The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.

People think, mistakenly, that etiquette means you have to suppress your differences. On the contray, etiquette is what enables you to deal with them; it gives you a set of rules.

Email is very informal, a memo. But I find that not signing off or not having a salutation bothers me.

For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.

A small wedding is not necessarily one to which very few people are invited. It is one to which the person you are addressing is not invited.

Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.

We already know that anonymous letters are despicable. In etiquette, as well as in law, hiring a hit man to do the job does not relieve you of responsibility.