Then, also yesterday, after work on a crowded subway, a woman reached over to tap me on the shoulder and say confidentially, "You have mascara under your eyes."

Now. No one wants spinach in her teeth. No one wants her dress tucked into the waistband of her tights. No one wants icing on her cheek. Very few want a long piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. I appreciate being alerted to these things. Mascara flaking onto my cheeks? I think I can handle it.

I'm not quite sure what about my 1950s ski sweater, boy's pants and filthy Chucks, or my armful of grocery bags, made her think that I was someone who would be bothered by this. If I'd stopped to think about it, I probably would have assumed that my ten-hour-old drugstore makeup job was a little the worse for wear. After she told me, I thanked her, and felt like I needed to make some pretense of having standards about these things, so I juggled my bags and took a half-hearted swipe at my begrimed cheeks.

Which ladymag is it who does that feature where women go out on the street in some state of humiliation - an enormous fake period stain on white pants, for instance - and see if passers-by come to their aid? ['Glamour'. -Ed.] I've never really understood the rationale behind this particular column, but I guess it's some kind of study of human nature, a mini "what would you do?" The rationale for alerting other people to this sort of thing is, generally, that the embarrassment of telling them is vastly outweighed by that which it will save. You do it because you would want someone to do it for you. And this is one of the many reasons that I've always preferred the somewhat more circumspect Analects interpretation of the Golden Rule, "Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you," as it seems a hedge against craziness. Because obviously this woman (whose grooming, it should be said, was flawless) would have wanted someone to tell her if her mascara was flaking - which it wouldn't be.

When you think about it, there's a pretty limited range of things that our society considers so unilaterally unacceptable that we can know with assurance that no one in her right mind could mindfully tolerate. Food on face and teeth. Open zippers. Popped buttons. All of them, really, the tiny things that keep civilization in check - keeping us just a few zipper teeth and buttonhole stitches from a Roussea-esque wildness of gobbled food and naked, Edenic prancing. When we see these things, our sense of personal and societal responsibility is such that we must act, we cannot sit by idly and watch someone commit the sin of obliviousness. By the same token, we'd never tell a bum on the subway that his fly was open - we assume he's opted out of these niceties of civilization, and wouldn't feel the appropriate wave of scalding shame. If we saw an old lady with lipstick on her teeth, we'd hardly make an issue of it; to do so might imply a larger failure. No, in a way it's a measure of respect to remind someone of these things - it implies shared standards, values, understanding. Which is why a communication breakdown like the mascara incident is so weird - was she wrong, or was I? Anyway, I made a stop at Sephora.

Emily Post was the scion of an old and respectable New York family, a great beauty who made a triumphant marriage that soon went sour. After a blackmailing scandal that outed her husband's infidelity, Post started a professional novelist's career. She wrote Etiquette as an alternative to the labrynthine rulebooks that came before.

During the Gilded Age, the rules of etiquette had become increasingly baroque; to be considered well-bred, a lady had to know not just how to wield a knife and fork but where to seat the guest of honor at a formal dinner, how to arrange a receiving line, when to send flowers to whom, and what to wear to a morning function, an afternoon function, and a ball. (As one etiquette writer of the eighteen-eighties observed, "Not even a saint could, from ‘inner consciousness’ alone, evolve a conception of the thousand and one social observances of modern fashionable life.")

In contrast to these esoteric rule books, as The New Yorker tells us, “Etiquette has characters — the Worldlys, the Wellborns, the Toploftys — who periodically appear and reappear to make introductions, hold christenings, and ask friends to their great camps for the weekend." Post's book emphasized conformity — getting along with the customs of your surroundings. Claridge says this allowed anyone, paradoxically, to become an insider, or at least blend in.

When I was a kid, my mom was strict about manners, but we — not to mention my dad — were never sure why. The order of utensils and protocol of introductions seems arbitrary in a world where no one knew or followed the rules. In a sense, etiquette seemed to have lost its purpose — an easy path to conformity. Etiquette was important because it put you at ease, because you knew what to do in a given situation, because rules and structure, when you know them, provide comfort. In a vacuum, the actual ins and outs of protocol are essentially meaningless.

However, a few years ago I ran across something in another old etiquette book — I wish I could remember which — that suddenly really made all this a lot clearer. The gist was: the basis of all good manners is kindness - putting others at ease, making sure no one is uncomfortable. To the extent rules facilitate this, great; but they should exist to make people comfortable rather than the reverse. It's easy to point out lapses in manners or breaches of protocol, but that kind of petty snobbery shouldn't have anything to do with actual etiquette. If you read Emily Post, this was at the root of a lot of her rules, too —paradoxically designed to grease the wheels of social interaction rather than keep things stilted.

Obviously the kind of conformity Post preached can feel anathema to those of us raised on the gospel of individuality, even an artificial imposition of gratuitous strictures designed to further stratify society. Certainly it evokes a society anything but open to diversity. Yes, obviously her work is a time capsule, an anachronism — therein lies much of its fascination. But bridge luncheons aside, I feel like you could argue this about any set of rules: someone needs to set them out; used well they impose order and comfort, but they can be perverted and employed for exclusion. That someone could set them out so authoritatively and immediately be accorded respect seems particularly American — we're always looking for guides and rules, much as we scorn them. And reading her book, it's hard not t have a little nostalgia for a time when using the right fork could alleviate anxiety; it's certainly cheaper than therapy!

Place Settings [The New Yorker]

If a woman lives to be 75, she should be able to chug her beer in a dining room. She should chug her beer in a boat, she should chug her beer with a goat, she should chug her beer here and there; she should chug her beer anywhere. And this is coming from a person who is a stickler about manners! But when it comes to booze and old broads, propriety simply flies out the window. Hasn't this lady earned the right to chug when and where she wants? Anyway, I'm off to go enjoy a beer.

Message In A Beer Bottle [Washington Post]

In any case, a select few from the younger generation are learning that while it may be cool to have an amazing MySpace profile or be a brilliant on IM, you need to make a good impression at a business dinner as well. The article mentions an L.A. program called Petite Protocol, but wouldn't it be a good idea to add this kind of stuff to the core curriculum all over this country — especially in Hollywood?
How Do You Get Today's Teenager To Smile? [Telegraph]