To think these are correct table manners or am I just a snob??

[Justintime3]

I was raised with strict table manners, yet I have never been sat at a table with anyone who has the same table manners I do! Are these over the top?

This is what I was taught

1. Do not eat until the person who cooked sits down (excused if the chef says you can start)
2. Do not eat until everyone has their food in a restaurant (excused if the person without their food says you can start)
3. Chew with your mouth closed and do not speak with your mouth full
4. Do not take calls or use your phone at the table. Excuse yourself if you need to
5. Put your knife and fork together at the front of your plate when you are finished
6. Offer the last serving of XYZ to the table before you take it
7. Thank the person who cooked and offer to clean up
8. Elbows off the table
9. Tear bread into small chunks to eat in a restaurant, don't bite off the whole roll

10. Use cutlery correctly

• index finger on top of your knife and fork
• spoons for soup and dessert only. Spoon the soup from the farthest side of the bowl
• load food onto the back of the fork with your knife. (No 'shovelling' as my mum called it)

My mum's always been really strict on it and is the type to point out people's bad table manners so I've always followed these to a T. Thoughts? Is this over the top and I'm a snob, or are these just normal to expect?

Because of how I've been raised I can't help but be put off when I see someone without these manners.

Just keen to see how others were raised!

Do you show a similar attitude to all rules?

But these are not 'rules' - e.g. the insistence on only using your fork in an inefficient, clumsy way and how you cut your bread roll - are just preferences that some people have: they are not rules that the majority of society subscribes to.

It's the equivalent of berating and shaming somebody for having a mid-morning snack at 10:30am, just because YOU like the whole 'elevenses' thing and somehow believe it to be a 'rule' for everybody; or taking somebody in the street to task for wearing socks with sandals, just because it's against YOUR personal 'rules'.

By all means have your own particular ways - even choose friends based solely on that if it's important to you - but it's silly beyond belief to somehow think they are universally-accepted 'rules'.

I've never really understood the no elbows on the table.

I was just about to say the same. I don't see the problem.

Social convention arises for a reason. If you don’t follow the rules why don’t you? They’re simple. Or do you think you’re somehow superior to people that do which means you don’t have to.

You sound very rigidly conventional @Maatandosiris. Which you're perfectly entitled to be - you do you, etc. - but you also seem very judgemental of people who aren't rigidly conventional. Why is that?

3 things that are unreasonable -

Elbows off the table - I was brought up with this too, it has no point to it and is just snobby to think otherwise. I would never enforce this sort of 'rules for rules sake' on my kids.

Tearing bread into tiny pieces - what wrong with just tearing it in half?

Using a knife and fork 'properly' - for many people with diagnosed and undiagnosed dyspraxia this just doesn't work for them, who got to decide what constitutes 'properly' anyway? In Thailand they eat with a fork and spoon.

Most people on here don't live in Thailand

Normal table manners IMO

Why?

I think we should keep a sense of perspective about this. Telling someone to fuck off in the street is not quite the same as eating with your knife and fork in the 'wrong hand'.

I think most of us here can appreciate the effect it would have on another if they were to be told to fuck off or called names in the street. Most of us can appreciate that is likely to be very different, however strict we are about it, to the effect on our wellbeing if someone three tables away in a restaurant has a fork in their right hand.
In this thread we have even seen how some aspects of table behaviour affect people more than others. We can apply some level of common sense, surely, over the degree to which something is abhorrent to someone else, and not make rather wild correlations between how one holds one's fork and being abused in the street.

Exactly. Someone noisily slobbering the food down their chin while talking and getting masticated dinner flecks on other diners = unpleasantly affecting other people. Someone cutting their bread rather than tearing or picking up chunks of food by skewering them on the fork rather than balancing on the back of it = has absolutely no effect on you whatsoever.

Exactly.

No, they seem to live in La-La Land

Of course no one wants to eat opposite someone slobbering away with their mouth open. But some of the 'rules' are silly as said before - roll buttering, having your index finger on your knife etc.

Of course if you were really posh you'd insist on eating a banana with a knife and fork. And I can honestly tell you that aristocrats do not follow some of what the middle classes think of as being posh rules. For instance I was offered a glass of champagne by a Duke in his london mewshouse in a large red wine glass. They also think saying toilet is very déclassé..... I could go on.

It makes me just want to rattle the cage if so called 'rules' that are really about thinking you're better than other people.

It’s progress if left handed people can use their cutlery in the hands that feel most sensible to them, don’t you think?

Nothing snobbish about having good table manners. I taught all these to my kids (now young adults). I always told them that good table manners will take them anywhere and so they can be confident at any meal, on any occasion.

Social convention arises for a reason.

Often that reason isn’t as nice as you’re imagining. Loads of social
conventions are based in the upper classes setting themselves apart from - and superior to - the ‘common people’.

Fannying around tearing small pieces off a bread roll any trying to balance peas on the back of a fork are nothing to do with practicality. It’s a clear social signal that you have the right kind of background - one that the ‘wrong’ type of people often don’t even realise is a signal. They don’t realise that cutting their roll open and buttering it has sent up a flare telling the ‘well bred’ there’s a usurper in their midst.

Loads of the comments on here are from
people whose own dining companions must be so dull that they’re busy watching people at other tables to check how they’re holding their cutlery or what they’re doing with a napkin. Then sneering about how (other) people have no manners these days. 🙄

This. I'd rather be the 'wrong' type of person than a nasty, small minded, judgmental snob like some on here.

@HairyMcHairyFace
You're wrong about soup. If we're going to be all Downton Abbey about it you should push the soup spoon away from you to the back of the bowl then lift it to your mouth.

I believe that’s what @Justintime3 meant in saying to the farthest side of the bowl.

Yes! I was brought up with lots of odd rules that my Mum and Dad had absorbed in their childhoods in the 1930s. Our roots are working class on my Mum's side and lower middle class on my Dad's side. I still find it very difficult not to use the word 'lady' as in 'Let the lady get past', although a workaround is 'Let people get past', I suppose. My Mum never refers to adult human females as women unless she thinks they are rather rough and unrefined, I'm afraid. Her preferred usage for women of all ages is 'girl' if she knows them and 'lady' if she doesn't. As she is nearly 91, this is not going to change any time soon. I strongly suspect the upper classes would have no truck with calling a woman 'lady'. I believe they look down their noses at those who say 'Pardon?' instead of 'What?'. Both my parents would have had conniptions if we'd said 'What?' to them.

Social convention arises for a reason.

Often that reason isn’t as nice as you’re imagining. Loads of social
conventions are based in the upper classes setting themselves apart from - and superior to - the ‘common people’.

Yes, indeed. At one time, the widespread social convention was for many guest and boarding houses to put up signs in the front window saying 'No Blacks, No Irish'.

Just politeness and trying to show kindness and consideration to others, eh?

Wholeheartedly agree with you @Justintime3 on all points, it’s just good manners.

OP I agree, I no longer watch come dine with me because of the way so many of the contestants eat, use cutlery and basically trough down.

I was raised exactly the same way. I try and adhere to them. I taught my children the same manners as well. It pains me to see people eating and cutting with just a fork. My partner likes using a spoon for some meals and I've learned not to watch him while he eats that way lol. I was taught when your knife and fork are at 20 to 4 it means that you've not finished your meal as yet. When you place your knife and fork together straight in front of you pointing to 12 then it means you've finished your meal.

Interesting about the 'ladies and gentlemen' thing, I was brought up to do that, never thought about it until I read a novel set in interwar England and written at that time. The premise was a working class girl moving to London to pursue a career on the stage. One of her mentors in London said, 'don't refer to people as 'Ladies and gentlemen'. It betrays your class and implies you think they are your betters'. Not an exact quote, as from memory, but words to that effect. It made me think that, actually, some of the conventions some of us grew up with may not be indicators of how polite and well-brought up we are, but rather indicators of how we were raised to defer to our perceived 'betters'.

I worked as a Saturday girl in a shop when I was 14 and we always had to say 'Ladies or Gentlemen', and that was definitely a throwback to the days when 'Ladies and Gentlemen' bought things in shops (I don't mean groceries, I mean clothes etc), whilst men and women served them.

YANBU. That's what I was taught by my parents, both from working class backgrounds. I wouldn't say that's particularly strict though. It's basic table manners.

Out of the many years on MN this is perhaps one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever read on here!