With the wit, tact, and wisdom that have made Miss Manners a household name, America's foremost authority on civilized behavior takes you through every aspect of your personal, professional, and social life with ease and charm. From somewhat classic queries: * What do I wear to a job interview/felony trial/jacuzzi? * Where does the soup spoon/seafood fork/butter knife go? To comments on truly modern phenomena: * Call waiting is like a child screaming for attention * Leaky earphones are the equivalent of humming To strictly personal do's and don'ts: * Don't communicate everything in a marriage ("I had the wildest dream about a man at my office...") * Do continue the ancient custom of mealtimes, that is, breakfast, lunch, and dinner And professional guidelines: * Don't start grabbing company property after being fired * If a candy dish is on the visitor's side of a receptionist's desk, it is for visitors... Miss Manners offers consistently sound, sage advice to her Gentle Readers. With a tipping guide (including coat checks and pizza deliveries), sections devoted to both traditional and nontraditional households, details on protocol for ceremonies and celebrations, invitations and disinvitations, insights on courtship and romance, and much more, this is the comprehensive guide to a kinder, gentler, more civilized society. Publishers Weekly Miss Manners covers everything one might need to know about proper behaviour, not just for the coming millennium, but in everyday life in the present decade...entertaining as well as practical. Kirkus Reviews How thoughtful of Miss Manners to provide us with this useful, almost encyclopedic guide to proper manners for the fin de siècle ...Elegant, sensible, exquisitely funny, Miss Manners...leads us through the dark forest of social despair and into the sunny glade of correctness. Miss Manners, also known as Judith Martin, writes a thrice-weekly newspaper column which is internationally syndicated by United Feature Syndicate. In addition to Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior and Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children, Miss Manners is the author of two novels: Style and Substance and Gilbert, a comedy of manners. Modern Ladies and Gentlemen So many traditional opportunities for smutty giggles have disappeared from society. Young people today cannot imagine what fun was once had by the simple exercise of calculating the number of months between a first baby's birth and the date of the parents' wedding. Miss Manners is therefore reluctant to subtract other such opportunities from modern life, which is grim enough. Nevertheless, it is high time that the traces of dirty humor be removed from friendships and business associations between ladies and gentlemen. For some decades, we have been operating under a system naively assuming that the only possible relationship between ladies and gentlemen was you-know-what. Therefore, the only set of manners they knew how to use with each other was, shall we say, social gallantry. Businessmen kept trying to pick up the checks for business meals with female colleagues or even female superiors, because the only form of meal they knew how to have with ladies was the date, in which the gentleman traditionally paid. The only pleasant language they knew how to employ was the exaggerated personal compliment appropriate to courtship but jarring in professional situations. Spouses protested working arrangements that teamed their husbands or wives with partners of the other gender, because they could only think of one activity these people might do together. Friendships were supposed to be segregated by gender, and opposite-gender people could see each other socially only if all spouses were present. Married couples did not accept dinner invitations unless both could attend. If someone you liked married someone you didn't, or your spouse didn't like the friend or the friend's spouse -- and the statistical chance of finding four people who are crazy about one another is small -- the tie was broken. The twentieth-century wedding is designed for the bride to have her close friends as bridesmaids, and the bridegroom to have his as groomsmen, with no role for her male or his female friends. The very term "just good friends" was popularly understood to refer to a clandestine romance. Miss Manners hates to be the one to break the news that there is just not that much sex in the world. The fact is that such innovations as coeducational dormitories and equal employment opportunity have surprised society by leading to affable companionship as much as or more often than to unbridled lust. Nor is this strictly a modern phenomenon. Sophisticated society in past centuries not only assumed that respectable married people were capable of individual socializing without falling into sin but looked suspiciously at couples who were always seen in each other's company. There must be a r