Talk To The Hand [Hardcover]

Just as the Internet is killing grammar and punctuation, TV is killing social graces. We're being taught to be rude, ignorant and insufferable as well as demanding and impatient. Many people toay seem to use Beavis and Butthead as their role models and more will learn from that and similar shows. Given that the average North American watches 22-25 hours of TV a week, and the vast amount of popular programming is dreck, that's not surprising.

Truss doesn't offer us any quick-fix answers; hers is more a gentle screed on our cultural development. And, of course, how bloody awful we are in the way we interact. We all know that we've arrived in some social hell in the proverbial handbasket, but she says it so much better than most of us.

She does suggest that by following a few simple rules of engagement we might lower the annoyance level a bit - use of forgotten terms like please and thank you, a little more social deference instead of the enforced familiarity foisted on us by customer service manuals, and in a very Buddhist sense, taking responsibility for your own actions, rather than leaving your mess for others to clean up.

An important point is that Truss delineates between "posh" manners which are rules of etiquette for their own sake (social graces which are usually intertwined with class structure), and social manners which govern and mitigate the way we interact at the street level. This isn't a book about which fork to use for your salad; it's a book about saying thank you when someone holds the door open, or stopping to let someone ahead of you back out of a parking space.

Would that this were mandatory reading today! But then, manners are in part being lost because we're reading less and watching TV more.

This brief book is nothing less than a treatise on the decline of western civilisation, and as the bibliography demonstrates, it is amazingly well researched. It sets out the types of 'rudeness' that are really forms of attack in the guise of personal freedom, such as a lack of inhibition in public no matter how much others are distressed by it, a lack of civility in customer relations, and the failure any longer to recognize anyone else's right to respect if it conflicts with your own immediate, impulsive need. Good manners may be seen as an outdated inconvenience to some, but they are a mark of how harmoniously a society functions. As Ms. Truss points out, no one any longer wants to be corrected in any way since correction is taken as personal criticism. People no longer understand the concept of shame. If they want to do or say anything, that is all the authority they need to do or say that thing, no matter how rude or inappropriate it is. Pointing out how someone's inconsiderateness is disturbing you can lead to a punch in the face, or worse.

There have been other times in history when people have claimed that the end of civilization is nigh, but I think for sheer degeneracy our current era will be hard to beat. Pendulums have a habit of swinging back, usually farther than anyone likes. It won't surprise me a bit if eventually some draconian authority takes power in the West and ensures that we not only don't chew any more gum but that we conform in ways that will make today's Singapore look like a paradise of liberality. We will only have ourselves to blame.

However, she lends a few interesting insights into the realm of why we think certain things are rude, and why we desire recognition for being polite. It is these occasional tidbits that earn this two stars, rather than one. Still, they are not a redeeming aspect, so I would recommend that a potential buyer (a) borrow this from a friend/the library or (b) find something else to read.