This week’s column is meant for anyone younger than 40, which ropes in most Millennials and all of Gen Z and more. But they won’t listen to Olds like me at 51, so maybe you good readers can find a way to slip this into their Ovaltine if they’re your kids or grandkids.

I suppose if I were smart and wanted to market this well to that crowd, I’d call what follows a “guide to adulting.” But I won’t, because using the non-word “adulting” is the kind of kiddie nonsense that young people should have stopped doing before they started doing it.

You’d think this set was raised in a joint custody arrangement between 2 Live Crew and a band of cockney orphans in Dickensian London.

The new 17?

We’re in an era of unprecedented infantilization. Chronological adults are grown-ups in years only; they have the minds of children. No, it’s not “just like it’s always been.” I’m not saying “the same things old people have always said.” There has never been a time in history before the Millennial generation when helpless, unskilled, and babyish behavior was tolerated in adults, let alone culturally praised as it is today.

The average 35-year-old in 2025 has the tastes, habits, and deportment of a 17-year-old from my youth. They bond over cartoon comic book superheroes; they giggle in the corporate office tower over Stanley-brand water cups and clicky acrylic nails like girls used to do in ninth grade in the bathroom.

I’ve had enough.

Let’s get to it.

OK, groomer

Fifteen years ago, I hired 24-year-old “Olga” for a secretarial job at my company. She was great and worked for us for years. But I almost fired her on the first day. She walked into the office wearing a belly-baring crop top and jeans slung so low she might have been modeling for a depilatory cream ad.

“This is not appropriate office wear; this is an outfit for the clubs,” I said as she looked at me shocked. Her mother had never told her that it wasn’t cute to wear provocative clothing to a professional job, because mom was too busy trying to look her daughter’s age.

Prescription for young ladies:

No exposed belly.

No excess cleavage — no more than half an inch should be shown, if any.

Wipe 75% of that makeup off, and absolutely no false eyelashes in broad daylight. That’s an evening look for women of questionable reputation.

Pry off those acrylic claws and keep your nails no longer than what’s standard for a French manicure. In fact, just do that — the French manicure.

Take that nose ring out.

Prescription for young gentlemen:

No dyeing your hair — not for fun, not to cover gray. Dyed hair on a man gives the impression that he’s unstable or untrustworthy. Do not sass me about this.

Shave your face, or, if you wear a beard, trim it neatly. You may not do handlebar mustaches or biblical patriarch 4-foot long trailing vines. Honestly.

Wash your hair. Repeat: Wash your hair.

Then comb it.

No long hair. No, a ponytail will not do. A gentleman’s hair should be short and neat. You may rock a fade, a modified slick ’50s pompadour (my favorite), and similar, but that’s all.

Buy jeans that fit sufficiently to remain above your butt crack, and tuck your shirt in.

No jewelry except a wedding ring or a class ring. No, you may not wear “just one diamond stud in my ear.” Do you want to look like a gentleman or a Brooklyn pimp from 1972?

That’s fashion and grooming sorted. Let’s move on to speech.

Talk stupe

If you’ve been alive for 50 years, you’ll notice how different America sounds today. You’ll notice how immature and declassé even newscasters sound now. As a young man, my friends mocked me for my sharp, nasal upstate New York/upper Midwest accent. Sample of me speaking at 17: “Oh my Gad! I’ll have a side seel-id with reeyinch dressing!”

I deliberately cultivated a (then-normal) “newscaster from nowhere” flat American accent, the kind that all professionals of every race and background strove for. It served me well in two ways.

First, my speech no longer made me sound like what I was (a welfare kid from a semi-rural trailer park), removing class-based preconceptions from the minds of people I needed to impress. You can object to that all you want, but it won’t change reality. If you talk like you’re down-market, you will be perceived as down-market.

Consider the widespread fashion among American young people to mimic low-class (and particularly black low-class) pronunciation and mispronunciation. It sounds “street.” It sounds vulgar. It sounds uneducated. Many of them think this is positive. It is not.

Second, since my aim was to communicate clearly and respectfully with my fellow adults, I no longer peppered my speech with up-to-the-minute slang and obscure in-jokes. Today, however, nearly everyone young (and too many older people) seem more focused on broadcasting how “cool” they are to their peers than in expressing their thoughts with elegance and precision.

Remove these from your vocabulary:

“Adulting,”

“Not a good look,”

“Comfy,”

“My journey,”

“Lived experience,”

“Do better,” and

“Super” as a replacement for “very.” In fact, drop “very” as well.

Glottal stop it

Amend incorrect and grating mispronunciations. The worst feature of modern accents are the glottal stops that everyone under 40 is suddenly inserting into words. You’d think this set was raised in a joint custody arrangement between 2 Live Crew and a band of cockney orphans in Dickensian London. If you don’t know what I mean, click here to listen to examples of glottal stops.

In all the following, people are dropping the ‘T’ sound and putting in a glottal stop. It’s nails on a chalkboard. The only kids who did this when I was in school came from ignorant households and were still saying “puh-sketti” at 12 years old.

Not “buh’in,” but “button.”

Not “impor’enh”, but “important.” (And never “impore-dent.”)

Not “kih’en,” but “kitten.”

Not “moun’uhn,” but “mountain.”

Extra credit: Stop dropping your G’s. You are “swimming,” not “swimmun.” This doesn’t sound “authentic;” it sounds stupid.

Bettman/Getty Images

Missed manners

A trip to any store will convince American adults of a certain age that remedial etiquette lessons are necessary. A great many parents have not instructed their children in the most elementary forms of manners and interpersonal communication.

Prescription:

Look people in the eye when they speak to you. Stop looking at your phone or at the floor.

But do not perform the Gen Z stare. If you’re not mentally retarded, you may not goggle at people with a blank expression as if you didn’t know how to respond to the greeting “hello.”

When someone says, “Hi, how are you,” you must respond. It’s easy. Just mimic the form back to them: “Hi there, I’m great. How are you?”

When placing a phone call, you identify yourself first. It’s intensely rude to call someone and ask for “Josh” without first saying, “Hi, this is David Smith from Smith Capital. I’m looking for Josh, please?”

The proper response to “thank you” is “you’re welcome.” It is not “no problem,” and it is never “no worries.”

Whine moms

Extra credit: Work on your pitch and intonation.

It started with the valley girls of the ’80s, but now everyone, man and woman alike, is speaking in what I call “gear-shift tonality.” Recall how a car engine winds up higher and higher as you shift a manual from first gear to second to third, etc. The pitch gets higher and higher until you shift, then it drops back down and starts again.

That’s for manual transmissions, not for human speech. Gear-shift tonality makes even declarative sentences sound like questions. It’s also known as “upspeak.”

Whatever you want to call it, stop doing it. Anyone not in your age set finds it annoying and wearying. It makes you sound child-like, tentative, unsure, or manipulative. Remember, Margaret Thatcher took vocal lessons to lower her speaking register in order to be taken seriously in world politics.

That concludes today’s instruction. Keisha and Valerie, you will stay behind and clean the chalkboards to work off the demerit for chewing gum (open-mouthed too). All remaining pupils may close their desks and take their primers home. Class is dismissed.

The decline of customer service — and why it matters

The United States has been in a civic crisis for decades. It’s not “just about manners,” but the lack of mannerly behavior is a widespread indicator of this problem. And manners are no small thing.

All societies have rules for how we engage with other people in a variety of settings, both formal and informal. Japan has “manners,” just as we do, even though the specific actions the Japanese take to signal good will to other people are different from the specific actions Americans take.

About seven seconds later, he finally offered verbal confirmation that he was aware of my existence: a monotone ‘’Sup.’

In the U.S., especially in Democrat/blue areas, manners are nearly extinct. The death of courtesy is a marker of a much deeper problem:

We no longer prize quality workmanship, functional products, or value for money. We only care about making the cheapest item or importing it from China.

Young people (roughly, those under 40) do not believe they owe work in exchange for their salary. They do not believe they owe even eye contact or vocal responses to customers.

Companies no longer care about customer service or fulfilling orders correctly because they do not have to care.

Americans have no “union,” if you will, of “ordinary consumers” who can exert pressure on big telecom companies or big-box chains. These companies have power because they make things we need, and they know we need them. Because consumers are not organized in a way that can exert leverage, companies do not experience much market punishment or market correction except in outlier cases like the recent kerfuffle over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding.

Best intentions

The story I’m about to tell you is typical and common where I live. This is the normal, everyday, standard experience. Those of you living in heavily blue/Democrat/woke/progressive areas have similar experiences; that’s where the social rot has set in most deeply.

I make a podcast/”TV show” every week. Both high-powered computers that process and transmit video in my home studio were zapped by a power surge. So I had to run to the big-box store to spend north of $2,000 for another computer so my business partner and I can make our show. My business partner ordered and paid online. I went to pick the equipment up. The order included a $2,100 computer and $200 in additional small merchandise like webcams and data cables.

The customer service desk at my local Best Buy had one employee serving another customer. When that customer left, the employee just stood there staring down at his computer. I waited quietly with my hands clasped in front of me. Nothing. He didn’t look up; he didn’t signal that he knew I was there. (I assure you, he did know.)

Gen Z stare

Why did I wait a full minute? Because experience has taught me that most requests for service from an employee are met with bemused detachment or hostility. I thought, “Better to just tolerate this and wait for him to acknowledge me than risk that angry glare because I spoke before I was spoken to.” No customer should have to make these calculations, but today we do.

Still nothing. So I walked a few steps closer. “Noah” (not his real name) looked up at me and gave me the “Gen Z stare,” vacantly gazing at me from behind black chunky glasses that covered half his face. No expression. No change in posture. No greeting. It started to feel uncomfortable.

Noah presented himself in the way that an astonishing number of young staff do today. Noah is the kind of person whose odd and slovenly appearance would have kept him from being employed at all when I was his age (about 20).

He was morbidly obese, as so many people are, but it wasn’t just that — I’m not making fun of fat people. It’s that he wore a skintight shirt that accentuated every curve, including — I’m sorry to write this — his breasts. I’m carrying 30 extra pounds myself, and I don’t walk around in Lycra stretch fabric inviting people to partake visually of every detail of my anatomy. But this is the “new normal” in public for employees today.

First contact

About seven seconds later, he finally offered verbal confirmation that he was aware of my existence: a monotone “’Sup."

I saw my opening and took it. “Hi, there. I’m here to pick up an order that my friend placed online and paid for. I’m having a little trouble pulling up the receipt on my phone, so would you like me —”

“Bar code,” he interrupted me.

That's what he said. Just the two-word phrase “bar code.” Was it a question? A command? A password challenge for access to a secret, actually helpful, customer service counter?

“I’m not sure what you mean by bar code," I responded. "But if that’s something included in the email, again, I’m having trouble pulling it up. Can I give you some other kind of information that would help?”

Smooth customer

I am polite when I do business in public. I maintain a warm tone of voice. A dozen years as a waiter and bartender, a few years in retail, plus two decades counseling grieving people by phone trained me in how to smoothly communicate with anyone, including people who are upset. I know how rude customers can be, so I take care to be friendly and approachable when I’m a customer.

All that to say, I was actively nice to this young man. I’m polite to every staff member of a business I patronize. Far too often, I get nothing back at all, or I get hostility, as I did last night.

“What’s your name?” Noah demanded. I told him.

Staring down at his iPad, he walked into the back room. He emerged carrying two small boxes containing the cables and the webcam. He did not have the computer. He placed the boxes on the counter and continued to look at his iPad without speaking to me or looking at me.

I waited about five seconds before saying, “I think there is more merchandise to this order.”

Notice that I did not say, “You forgot my computer.” I used a gentle, roundabout way to say it because I’ve learned that if you signal that a staffer has made a mistake, they will sometimes melt down.

Noah did not glance up at me. He kept staring at the iPad as he went back to the stock room. He brought out the computer and put all three boxes in my hand. Then, after a few words (I think I heard him say good night in a perfunctory way) he went back behind his counter.

He did not give me a receipt; he did not stamp the boxes to indicate that I had paid for the merchandise. I wondered about this, as the store has a lectern at the exit to stop shoplifters by checking receipts.

Trust fail

Here’s what I didn’t tell you until now: Noah never asked me for a driver’s license or a credit card to prove that I was the Josh Slocum who paid for these items. He made no effort to determine that I was the paying customer, not a thief. What if he had handed it to someone else, and when I arrived, the store told me, “Yes, you did pick these up already because our system says you did”?

At this point, I needed to leave the store to keep my temper. So I just walked out with my merchandise (paid for, but how did they know?). None of the three employees at the shoplifting/receipt-checking lectern at the front glanced at me as I walked by. Two were talking to each other, and the third was running his thumbs over his phone.

This is why we have so much shoplifting. There are no consequences to naked, caught-on-camera thievery.

Gilbert Uzan/Getty Images

Punching out

There are certainly no consequences to employees who are incompetent, rude, and who allow expensive merchandise to simply disappear. They do not get fired. Why would they? Do you think a manager in this Best Buy can’t see how these employees fail to do their jobs? She sees what I see. It’s either that she doesn’t care, or those above her don’t care, so she’s just stopped putting in any effort.

What are we going to do? Is there anything we can do? We don’t have market power as consumers, so that’s out. Government regulation usually brings more problems than it solves, so that doesn’t seem like a good way to go. But this cannot go on.

Well, it can, actually. We can become like former Soviet states; hell, we’re already three-quarters of the way there. When I tell stories like these to older people who immigrated from communist countries, they get a pained look and say, “This is what it was like for us, and it’s happening here. But no one will listen to us.”

If you see a way out that I do not see, please share it in the comments.

Forget service with a smile — these days I'd settle for service from a human

After a week of dealing with service calls to my internet company and having to go to many more stores than usual, I suspect there’s a coordinated campaign to prevent humans from talking to each other.

I’m not entirely kidding. Have you noticed, especially since the “pandemic,” that it’s becoming the new-normal to be stopped from speaking to other people? We’re now directed to “interface” with machines. It happens on the phone, at gas stations, at grocery stores, at restaurants.

There’s something so off about walking up to the register while one lone employee stands in front of the cigarette case and monitors you while you do his job.

Have you been handed a piece of paper with a QR code on it when you’re seated at a restaurant and told to “scan this for the menu”? Have you been told (not “asked”) to scan your own groceries, bag them, and punch your payment into the register?

How about the robotic phone tree lady that prevents you from speaking to a person at the gas company, the bank, or any other business you call?

Phoning it in

People have been complaining about the decline in customer service since at least as far back as the 1980s. The worst of it was the then-recently invented phone tree.

Phone trees have always been irritating, but they’re out of control now: There is no human staffed department to which you can be directed. Worse, companies deliberately restrict the subjects you can “ask” about by leaving them off the menu options, and the systems hang up on you if you try to get a human agent.

It’s getting infinitely worse with the overnight adoption of shiny, glittery-new AI technology. In the past month, I finally stopped doing business with my old internet company — a huge multinational company that you have heard of and not in fond terms — because it has programmed its AI “customer service rep” to blatantly refuse to connect customers with a human.

Call waiting (and waiting)

Here’s how these online chats go:

AI agent: Please choose from billing, technical support, or new sales.

Me: Need more options. Need agent.

AI: Please choose from billing, technical support, or new sales.

Me: Agent.

AI: I’m sorry, please choose from ...

Me: Agent! I need an agent! My question is not listed!

AI: I’m sorry, but I cannot connect you to an agent until you follow the suggested steps above. Goodbye.

And then the chat window closes, or the call disconnects.

Yes, I’m serious. The robots now brazenly hang up on you if you don’t obey their commands. How did customers suddenly end up having to take orders from company devices instead of the other way around?

Inconvenience store

It’s no better in person, and I’m sorry to say that human behavior is just as bad as robotic misconduct. This week, I needed a five-gallon jug of kerosene. I heat and light my home in cold weather with restored antique kerosene lamps. These aren’t the small "Little House on the Prairie" oil lamps you’re thinking of; they’re big thirsty bad boys that put out major light and heat.

So I go to the farm store, where they sell kerosene in large jugs at 40% less than other stores. When I walk over to the shelf, there’s nothing there. Damn. Now, I have to weigh whether or not to talk to a staff member.

Fifteen years ago, this wasn’t a hard decision — in fact, it wasn’t a decision at all. But today? The most common response I get from store staff when asking for help is a facial expression that communicates irritation and an attitude meant to express, “You, customer, are inconveniencing me.”

It’s most pronounced in anyone under 40, as Millennials and Gen Zers were not taught things like “doing your job” or “not being awful to the people who pay your wage through their customers.”

I chance it and ask the frazzled 22-year-old at the register. He won’t make eye contact with me, of course. “Hi there. I see that the kerosene isn’t in its usual spot. Could you please tell me if you have it in stock, or when you will have it in stock again?”

Without looking at me, he replies, “I don’t know.” What am I supposed to say to this? Wouldn’t you take that as another way of saying, “I’m not going to answer your question, and I want you to go away?”

So I say, “Right. Could you please tell me who might know or how I will be able to find out whether I will be able to buy kerosene here and when that might be?”

Annoyed, the cashier makes an exasperated noise and says, “They don’t tell us what’s coming on the truck. All I know is that it comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays — check back then.”

When I worked retail, had my boss observed me speak to a patron like this, I would have been fired on the spot.

No talking

My last stop on this outing is to grab some lunch. There’s a brand-new gas station/convenience store/truck stop that just opened two miles up the road from where I live in Vermont. It’s sort of like a northern version of the famous Bucc-ee’s truck stop “malls” you see in the South. You can get hot and cold food, soft drinks, beer, liquor, small electronics accessories, motor oil, and toys to keep the kids quiet.

Sadly, “make the customer do the store’s job” has metastasized to the corner store, too.

This place is all self-checkout. There’s something so off about walking up to the register, while one lone employee stands in front of the cigarette case and monitors you while you do his job. There’s no etiquette for it. The employees don’t greet you, leaving you wondering if they’re afraid you’ll ask them to do something if they signal that they’re aware of your presence.

I am prepared for that. I am not prepared for having to do the same thing for a sandwich.

I stand at the deli counter for about two minutes, while two employees stand behind the counter 20 feet away chatting with each other as if I were not there. Then, it dawns on me. There is that bank of iPads blazing out saturated color. I, the customer, am forced to punch a touchscreen on the machine to put in my order. There is to be no talking to other humans.

The device has every annoyance, starting with the fact that the customer is forced to learn a new, company-bespoke set of “buttons” and software, adding frustration and time to what ought to be a simple request.

Employees won’t talk to you, of course, even when they know you’re having trouble. After finally (I think) placing my order, dramatic pipe organ music starts blaring from a hidden speaker. It’s playing a plagal cadence, the part at the end of a church hymn that goes “aaaaa-men.” Apparently, this signals that one’s order has been sent to St. Peter and will be delivered shortly.

The younger of the two counter staffers looks at me briefly while the fanfare echoes against the tile walls. I say, “Am I allowed to talk to you?”

She just stares at me.

Does anybody remember how to behave in public?

In 1982, a fire broke out in the apartment building next to ours in Orange County, California.

I was 8 years old and home alone after school, a latchkey kid. The smoke alarms went off. I recalled the training about what to do in a fire from our parents and the public service announcements that used to run on television. In this case, the right thing to do was to leave quickly and go up the street to my grandmother’s house.

Fellow adults, we have to be adults again. Even if the other grown-ups around us don’t like it, we of good will have to work to reinstill polite, considerate, and safe public behavior.

As I was walking to the front door, I grabbed my belt, tucked my Superman T-shirt into my jeans, and fastened the belt.

It was an automatic action. My brother and sister and I were not to leave the house with dirty faces, uncombed hair, or disheveled clothing. It didn’t cost me any time, as the belt was right there; I would have run faster if the flames had been licking my heels.

I remember the pride I felt when Grandma called my mother to tell her I was OK. “By God, he remembered to put his belt on before he left the house; he’s such a good boy,” she said.

The bare minimum

Going out in public neat and presentable was not something you thought about; it was just a way that you lived. Look around you now at the grocery store, at Applebee’s, on a downtown sidewalk. People from age 6 to 60 are walking around with snarled hair, fat rolls hanging down underneath too-small shirts, and dirty clothes. Your nose will tell you that the percentage of Americans who shower daily is substantially lower than it was 43 years ago.

We have a manners crisis. The crisis is that we have abandoned manners, rules, and common standards that make living in society bearable and, once in a while, pleasant.

At 50 years old, I find myself shocked to discover that I’m not considered a “grown-up” whom children or teenagers need to treat with minimal respect. Adults can no longer correct misbehaving children in public without risking getting punched by their enraged parents.

Kids in adult bodies

There are very few adults left. There are plenty of people in adult bodies, but so many except the most elderly of the old walk around like spoiled children, ignorant of everyone around them and devoid of even the smallest courtesy to fellow citizens. The adults won’t let you correct their kids because they themselves have never corrected them. The bad example grown people set — including a majority of modern parents — for the young has destroyed civilized behavior.

We are a nation of narcissists. “I’m gonna get mine no matter what it does to you” is our motto. It’s reflected in nearly every advertisement for the past 15 years. Think of the phrases you hear most often in pitches for products: “No boundaries,” “tear down barriers,” “nothing is more important than YOU.” Those are verbatim (and common) phrases from commercials that will be familiar to many.

Fellow adults, we have to be adults again. Even if the other grown-ups around us don’t like it, we of good will have to work to reinstill polite, considerate, and safe public behavior.

I do not have children of my own, but in middle age, I have paternal urges. I want my nieces and nephews to know how to act like ladies and gentlemen. I want the schoolkids in my town to respect themselves, their peers, and the adults who care for and educate them. Not “just because.” I want this because our etiquette-free Thunderdome has made the U.S. a pretty miserable place to be if you ever have to conduct business in public.

We are not happy people. You see it on the faces of the young and the old. It doesn’t have to be this way.

My friends from the South tell me that manners and civility are still very much alive where they live, and I’m glad to hear that. But having lived up North and in Democrat/blue areas most of my life, I can tell you that the slovenly rudeness is appalling. And worse, few if any adults seem to even notice it — except those of us who still practice mannerly ways while being called “old-fashioned” and mocked.

The wisdom of Miss Manners

Etiquette expert Judith Martin is known to older readers as Miss Manners. For decades she wrote a syndicated column on etiquette, combining practical advice with the kind of arch and hilarious prose you find only once in a generation. When I went off to a snooty, expensive liberal arts college in my early 20s, my older friend got me a copy of several of Martin’s books.

Being young and callow myself, I expected to hate them. Instead, I realized the lady knew what she was talking about. Everything she advised made sense and rang close to the lessons I remembered learning as a child but hadn’t fully understood.

Martin was at pains to correct misperceptions about etiquette. It is not mainly about when to use a fish fork at a swanky dinner party (with the fish course — duh); it’s not an affectation of the idle rich from a Victorian novel of manners.

Nay, etiquette is the domain of the shared and universal folkways and manners that make personal, social, and business life predictable and bearable. It sets out social rules and makes available social punishments for those who take advantage.

Most importantly, she noted that etiquette is not about “making everyone feel comfortable.” Here’s a bit of advice she gave to a reader who was tired of having people she met ask her about her baby’s due date since she wasn’t pregnant.

“People often tell Miss Manners that etiquette is just a matter of making other people feel comfortable,” Martin wrote. “Well, often, yes. But there are times to make people uncomfortable enough that they stop discomforting others. This is one of them.”

Rude awakening

We have all gotten too comfortable with being personally comfortable at the expense of others. If the 1970s were the “me” decade, then we are living in the age of self-love and self-care. Another name for that is narcissism. It is high time for the manners-minded among us to start making the rude majority uncomfortable enough that they stop stepping on our toes literally and figuratively.

Readers, I do not know exactly how we are to do this. It’s a project that needs collective buy-in; it’s a “tragedy of the commons” problem. We’re afraid to appropriately upbraid the sullen and unhelpful clerk because we know that her boss is likely to side with the 17-year-old with a face full of metal and green hair. We’re more likely to be fired as a customer than a snotty, incompetent teenager is likely to lose her job for being rude to patrons.

Some modest proposals

But we must find a way to do it anyway. As a start, here is a short list of mannerly and orderly behavior we all remember from not so long ago that should make a comeback.

We walk on the right side of the sidewalks and store aisles. Not the left and never right up the middle. Civilized people do not stand in the middle of an aisle with a cart ignoring those trying to get past.
We hold doors open for the person behind us. Walking through without even a glance backward while the door slams on the next patron is rude.
Red lights mean “stop,” not “floor the accelerator through oncoming perpendicular traffic.”
The left lane of a highway is for passing, not travel. Civilized people do not go 55 miles per hour in the left lane, matching speed with the other car in the right lane, preventing all other motorists from passing by creating a two-car barrier.
Telephone calls are private, not public. Taking a call at all in public is rude. Holding your phone out like a platter with the speaker function on is actively hostile to everyone around you. Civilized people excuse themselves for important calls and take them around a corner. There was a reason telephone booths existed.
No one should ever hear the beeping noises or, God forbid, the TikTok videos playing on your phone. Silence that infernal contraption or put in earbuds.
Children should address adults as Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms., not as “Tyler” and “Caitlin.” A compromise would be the Southern way; children address adult friends of the family as “Mister Mike” and “Miss Kate.”
Pedestrians may have the legal right of way, but being in the legal right does not annul the laws of physics. Civilized people do not slowly saunter into oncoming traffic, deliberately refusing to turn their heads to observe cars as if daring them to strike. One day, somebody will, and it won’t be the driver’s fault.
When you place a call to someone, you, the caller, identify yourself first. Have you noticed this modern practice when you get a call? You answer the phone, and some person you’ve never heard of says, “Is this Josh?” Excuse me? Who are you?
Decent people cover their bodies in public. The amount of skin on display, including excess cleavage and buttocks hanging out of “clothes,” is obscene. If your great-grandmother dead in 1960 could be brought back to life, you would forgive her for assuming the top occupation in 21st-century America is prostitution. The only person who can get away with wearing a gownless evening strap is Cher.

Maybe you’ll have some ideas to leave in the comments.

How Ditching Social Norms Guarantees Failure, Not Freedom

American society has largely abandoned universal norms — of appearance, language, and behavior — in favor of an à la carte culture.

Mugger in ninja costume gets painful lesson in manners from etiquette-teaching mom — who also knows how to kickbox

Myka Meier told the New York Daily News she was enjoying a pleasant walk with her 3-year-old daughter Monday morning in the Chelsea area of Manhattan when a mugger in a ninja costume attacked her from behind.

A 38-year-old etiquette teacher, Meier also happens to be pretty good at kickboxing, the paper said — and she wasn't about to play the victim on this day.

What are the details?

"It felt like he came out of nowhere," she recounted to the Daily News, noting that the crook tried to steal her bag. "He came to my right side, where my bag was, but it was looped around my shoulder. He didn't say anything. I still had my bag in my possession, and I kicked him. I just started kicking. The self-defense courses I've taken took over."

Meier told the paper she also was in "mama bear mode" given her daughter's presence. Here's a lighthearted moment between them posted to Instagram a week before the harrowing encounter:

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'I think he was shocked that I fought back'

"I think he was shocked that I fought back," she added to the Daily News. "I think I was more aggressive than he intended. But I train for this stuff. I leave my manners classes, and I go kickbox."

Meier screamed and fought off the ninja-costumed crook — who also was wearing a red cloth around his forehead — before he took off; but she did battle long enough for two construction workers and a doorman to chase him down, the paper said.

"There was a little tug of war over the bag for maybe about a second, and then he started running once I think he saw the attention coming," she noted to the Daily News. "The doorman and the two construction workers did their thing and just grabbed him and held him."

Meier told the paper she was bruised on her back and arms after she fell — albeit still kicking — and tore a thumbnail. She noted that her appearance likely gave the mugger the impression she was an easy target, the Daily News said.

Oh, how wrong he was.

"I don't want to be seen as the helpless victim," Meier told the paper. "I teach etiquette at the Plaza Hotel. I am always in a dress and high heels, but I want people to know that you can be ladylike and fight off an attacker at the same time."

What happened to the suspect?

Police arrested Casique Roman, 41, of Hackensack, New Jersey, and charged him with robbery, the Daily News said, adding that authorities noted he's been busted in New York and New Jersey over the last six years for criminal mischief and possession of drug paraphernalia.

"We got the man, and he's off the streets, and I hope he stays off the streets," Meier told the paper. "This isn't an innocent person. This is a violent man that would attack a mom with her child. He was aggressive. Had I been thinking clearly, I would have just given him my bag. I was just in mama bear mode."

She added to the Daily News that the suspect also is in dire need of etiquette.

"I'm all about educating people on manners," Meier noted to the paper. "This guy certainly needs some."

Here's a clip from Meier's etiquette channel on YouTube recorded earlier this year:

Myka Meier -- Welcome to My Youtube Channel!youtu.be

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