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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I remember when elbows off the table was a trend. It was the 70s maybe from this jingle? We had to learn about it from a jingle, y'all.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fivBoHfgEs[/youtube][/quote]

Yeah, this no-elbows-on-the-table thing was taken to a bizarre extreme. And it was never a real rule of etiquette. It's rude to eat while your elbows are on the table -- you don't want to be shoving food in your mouth in that posture. But to put them on the table before eating, between courses, after, or whatever, is perfectly acceptable etiquette. [/quote]

In a pub, perhaps.

But nothing but your hands and wrists should touch the table in an upscale restaurant or as a guest at someone’s house, particularly if it is a formal meal in their dining room.  Lounging with your elbows or arms on the table just isn’t done.  It is slovenly.[/quote]

You know a lot less about etiquette than you think you do. Elbows on the table are fine in an "upscale restaurant" when there is no food on the table. Same with regard to "a formal meal in [a] dining room." Nothing inherently "slovenly" about it until you start eating. [/quote]

False.  You’re no longer sitting upright resulting in slovenly posture.[/quote]

False. You can suavely lean on one elbow, gesticulating with the other hand. Perhaps holding a champagne glass as you do so.[/quote]

Elbows off the table is a very old one. I can't remember all the words, but something like "Mabel Mabel strong and able, get your elbows off the table." Although it was only occasionally mentioned in our house. Five kids, blue collar, my mom usually had some kind of part time job and didn't have the time for focusing on the niceties.

I don't know why, but physical affection was scarce in my family. I have a vivid memory of visiting my grandparents when an aunt and uncle and their kids arrived, and one of my cousins--she was a year younger than me, and I remember her being maybe 8 or 9 years old--running up to my grandpa to throw her arms around him and him hugging her back and how astonished I was that 1) people really do that in real life and 2) my grandpa hugging her back, but I saw him as this stern man who would yell at us for climbing in the corn crib or building forts with hay bales. But those cousins were very "girly" and their mother (aunt by marriage) very warm and also feminine in ways my mother definitely was not (my mom always had self-esteem issues, I think).

I can think of skills I grew up with a lot of people seem to lack. Cooking, how to thread and use a sewing machine, canning fruit, pulling weeds out after a rain when they pull out easily, checking air pressure in a tire, tightening the opposite lug nuts when you have to change a tire (instead of going around clockwise or counter clockwise), connect jumper cables.

I was aware of the fancier things in life, mostly from books, but none of that was real until I left home.  My brother, who stayed on the farm, is clueless about tipping. He took me out to dinner with his family on a visit, and when my niece and I told him to leave a tip he was going to leave a dollar on a $70 check until my niece (who is in college and works as a server part time) and I ganged up on him. He was genuinely surprised when we said 10 was the absolute minimum. I knew about tipds because I waitressed a little during high school although 10% was more typical in those days and not everybody tipped. [/quote]

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