Table manners

[Higglings]

Am I unreasonable to hate looking at my partner when we're eating because he holds his knife like a pencil. It really grates my nerves.

It just shows these MN posters are uncultured snobs when they spout on about someone holding cutlery incorrectly. Like listening to my grandma and now my mother being mad my DD prefers to switch her fork holding hand about (US style) - makes me rage! Choose a better Battle.

It's peas- you eat them. Just don't show me them in your mouth as you chew them and I'm good 🤣

Or they're holding their cutlery in the way that's most comfortable to them and you need to MYOB.

I can't imagine giving a toss about something so insignificant, honestly.

Are you sure? I was under the impression that pushing them onto the concave fork from the side (ie the sensible way, what as how I does) was completely infra dig.

I was always taught that flicking your peas up in the air one by one & catching them in your mouth was the only socially acceptable way to eat them.

🙄

It's basic table manners, something a lot of you apparently lack.

Argh!

Yabu, you let a pencil holder become your partner.

Yes this is my view too.

Holding the knife in a non standard way may be bad etiquette, but criticising that would be bad manners which is much worse.

"I eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life; It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife..."

~Spike Milligan

😂😂😂

I think it was just desperation

My DH holds his fork like a pencil. His table manners are otherwise good so I quashed my surprise and faint horror as I know it is an arbitrary thing that doesn’t really matter.

If he was a noisy eater we would never have got together as I can’t bear it. It’s conditioning as my family were very strict on it but it’s been very effective conditioning in my case and it makes me irrationally angry and puts me off my food.

My DH has a really strange way of using cutlery whereby he holds the utensil low down very close to the eating bit (or the cutting bit) with the tips of his fingers and the handle sticking out at the side of his hand. I hate it. However we didn't meet until he was 53 and my children (who know how to use cutlery properly) were grown up and left home - so I just don't look at it if I can help it. I reason that he has never been taught how to eat properly and it's too late for him to learn how - plus why should he as he doesn't spill food all over the place and he is a grown man!

My sibling is a teacher in a fee-paying school and has to eat with the children at lunchtime. She says some of the children don't know how to use cutlery at all and just eat with their fingers. That is why it is so important to teach children table manners.

😀

I get it. Mine wears a fucking cpap thing. Though it is a vast improvement on jumbo jet volume snoring. You just need to ask yourself if this is ltb territory or if you need a wee punching bag in the garage or something to release the rage!

It would drive me insane too OP. I can't stand seeing grown adults who won't hold their cutlery properly, I would say something. I think people who can't hold their knife and fork properly are badly brought up, it's so easy to teach children to eat with good manners. I was taught by my parents who were taught by theirs, I taught mine and they taught their children.
It means you can go anywhere at all, from the lowest to the most refined fine dining, and not embarrass yourself by not knowing how to eat properly. It's not about being an "MC boomer" as another poster put it, lots of working class people can hold their knife properly for god's sake.
So many people on here are so defensive about not knowing how to hold their cutlery properly and say it doesn't matter, but there is an accepted correct British way to hold it so why not do it that way.

People that hold their forks this way 😭

Hate it. Looks so ridiculous. I don't care if I'm not meant to judge it. I do judge it.

It bugs me too, to see people HKLP (Holding Knife Like a Pen). But what bothers me more is when diners wave their knives or forks around when they’re talking, usually with elbows on the table and cutlery therefore swinging around at eye level. Just stop.

@DappledThings Agree. They shouldnt be allowed to dine. Eating like toddlers

No, that’s the opposite of what you are meant to do. You do not eat peas off the fork like it’s a shovel. The actual “upper class” way of eating them I to hold them in place with the knife and stab them with the tine, and you can push them up the tines with your knife to make sure they stay on. Then you get them. You don’t scoop them up with the front or the back.