Posted by cainxinth 22 hours ago
Others I don't know that I would have much of an inclination to do and haven't seen but am not sure if it's because it really is a faux pas or just because no one else really tends to do it either.
Whereas when I had a date with a girl from Kyoto, one of the first things that happened when we went to eat was she had to stop me from picking up my chopsticks impolitely and show me the proper way of doing it.
Suffice it to say my Osaka-learned table manners and speech patterns meant there was no second date.
I don't know where you're from, so apologies if this is an unfair assumption, but in countries like the US or Australia people often seem less attuned to social class, whereas in places like the UK, France, and indeed Japan, those distinctions can carry more weight, even if they almost always go unspoken.
(I did try to explain to her that it was more related to my being left handed than my attempting to emulate European behavior. It didn't seem to make much difference to her.)
This explains the difference. The European method seems the most optimal.
On the other hand, I don't think Americans ever pick up food with their fork and switch the loaded fork to the other hand, especially if the food is scooped, not speared. A lot of food would be dropped in the process.
As a non-conformist, I taught myself to use my knife in the non-dominant hand so that the fork is used in the same hand regardless of knife usage.
Or, it could be what my English son-in-law does, he uses his fork and knife, in different hands to aid in pushing food onto his fork. (He's right handed, not that it matters in this case.)
Most people have settled into Estuary, which has split into a high/corporate/media Estuary-tinged dialect, and low street Estuary. The BBC has its own special neutral version.
Fifty years ago the difference between upper class/BBC/RP and street English was almost hilariously obvious. Watch a BBC show from the 50s and 60s - even something like Dr Who - and everyone is speaking a unique RP dialect that doesn't exist any more.
In media, you’re quite correct - it has become rare bar presenters who are now in their 80s or older.
We just grow up with it because it’s how our parents and the parents of our friends speak.
If you want to change your accent you can, of course, get elocution lessons but most Brits do not. We just have a large variety of accents of which RP is one.
I didn’t have lessons for it and I don’t know anyone else that did. It’s just how we speak.
How so?
You don't have to follow them, but you do you should be ready to accept the consequences of your choice.
In the area I grew up in, caring too much about useless aesthetic stuff like “elbows on the table” would have a social cost.
Mind you, I'm not saying that standards must be followed. I am just saying the same thing I tell my kids:
- the standards are there, wishing they didn't exist doesn't invalidate them
- the reason rules and standards came to existence might or might not be applicable to our current context, but some people will expect you to follow them regardless.
- If a rule or standard seems silly to you, make your best attempt at understanding why people would still follow it. (Chesterton's fence)
- You are free to not comply to some rules, but always be ready to accept the consequences of your decisions.
- What your friends are doing or not doing is not reason enough for you to change your behavior or choices.
But not observing them does. There are standards no one in the world follows anymore. They may still “be there”, but are only used for mocking purposes.
> If a rule or standard seems silly to you, make your best attempt at understanding why people would still follow it. (Chesterton's fence)
The corollary to that is that anyone who rebukes anyone else for not following a standard must be able to explain why it exists. “Because it’s rude” it’s not good enough, explain why it’s considered rude.
Are you just looking for an argument here?
Not quite. My original comment was in response to "I see people violating rule X anywhere, even though I was told it was 'wrong'".
All I am saying is one shouldn't be basing their behavior solely on what they see others "getting away with".
I had a friend who came from a working class culture where social aspiration was measured by tiny nuances, like whether someone put milk in their tea before or after pouring it.
Outside of that culture these nuances were irrelevant. Middle and upper class people had a completely different set of etiquette markers - as well as more or less obvious displays of wealth - which the working class aspirers were oblivious to.
If people act like a standard doesn't exist, then the standard actually doesn't exist, because that's the only thing that defines a standard.
Standards are not absolutes.
I guess that’s the cultural divide that occurs when one community is fishing and trading while the other does, like, competitive perfumed calligraphy or whatever.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/1026+CD+Durgerdam/@52.3790...
I dated many foreign girls and it was always fun to discover the cultural differences.
There are similar faux-pas in France but, really, nobody with an ounce of common sense cares. You like your red wine cold as I do? Someone will maybe mention that you will be loosing some aroma znd that's all. You add sugar and ice? This is probably not a drink for you and you will get some laughs but that's all.
I eat my starters after the main meal in the company restaurant, nobody cares.
You are there to have pleasure, this is not West Point
One of my favorite alcoholic drinks is port + ice, which it sounds like the only difference here would be that wine + sugar + ice would be much weaker in terms of alcohol content.
Fun fact: "chambrer le vin" i.e getting (usually red) wine from storage temperature to "room temperature" comes from a time where said room temperature was well below 20 degC (more like 13-15 degC), not the comfortable 20+ degC that people like to enjoy these days.
Jarvis Cocker-san.
I did not make that mistake ever again.
For context - it's a way of saying "death to your family" or something akin to that.
I don't think an elderly person who lives in a different country is actually a good guide to modern practice.
Also, I was asking about Japan. I believed my Chinese teacher (in China).
> For context - it's a way of saying "death to your family" or something akin to that.
Nothing so specific. It is felt to resemble something you'd see at a funeral.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_utensil_etiquette
Edit: The wiki on chopsticks has an etiquette section broken down by country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chopsticks#Chopstick_customs,_...
The difference between the American and European styles has been used as plot point in fictional works, including the 1946 film O.S.S. and the 2014 series Turn: Washington's Spies.[5] In both works, using the wrong fork etiquette threatens to expose undercover agents.
Strange that the wiki implies you set the knife down after each cut.
Is the issue that people have difficulty cutting with their left hand? Because if you can the process of eating is pretty efficient: hold with fork, cut with knife, move food on fork to mouth …
Absolutely a non-issue in reality obviously. But nowadays I do hold my cutlery "properly" as a result. To me it now feels natural to bring the fork to my mouth with the left hand. Or the right one, really, but I default to holding it in the left.
>Bread is always served and can be placed on the table cloth itself
This is extremely rare, to the point where I can't remember the last time I saw it. Is bread really.. always served?
> In the United Kingdom, the fork tines face upward while sitting on the table.
Tines down isn't uncommon in the UK either
>if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
>it is permissible to place a small piece of bread at the end of the fork for dipping
Its also 100% fine to dip bread in a sauce with your fingers. Putting bread on a fork if you've licked the fork and then dipping the bread would cause everyone to hate you, so *don't do this*
> I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
So the norm is that if you're eating one-handed, you use your non-dominant hand? That seems really counterintuitive to me; is it because you're so used to having the fork in the non-dominant hand that it feels awkward the other way? Which hand do you use when eating with a spoon?
If people don't even know it, it's not part of the culture.
This makes total sense to me. There is no monolithic “culture”— there are multiple related cultures, differing little in essence but differing greatly in the details. And each individual is usually only partially ignorant anyway.
Culture changes, too, and asymmetrically. So the “done thing” may be done be very few anymore.
Add an s and it gets a little better.
What do you think "reading" means?
1. Upper class stopped being formal because formality stopped being a signal of upper class.
2. Middle class stopped having social gatherings in general.
So, like, "it is a part of the culture" in the same sense as traditional outfits are a part of the culture - most people have very vague awareness, nobody really cares.
This is unnecessarily flippant, trivializing, and reductive.
The upper classes had the time and position to refine manners. I think one mistake people make is to think manners are arbitrary nonsense. But manners, when fitting, honor the self and others with conduct that suits the dignity of the human person and functions as a sign of that dignity. You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.
I’m not one for stiff artifice especially when slavishly applied, but I don’t think manners as such are arbitrary. That nobody cares would explain why so many people look like slobs and behave like boors.
If we begin with human nature and then view the virtues as perfections that actualize the fullness of that nature, then it becomes clearer that some behavior is more fitting and honored better by certain practices.
The upper classes in the UK regularly practice tone policing, where legitimate dissent is waved away as uncouth, even though what they say and do is far worse in private, and sometimes in public.
If you're looking for human dignity, I don't think this is its natural home.
This phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because what one considers basic etiquette another considers a theatre. The end result is often that people gather in order to perform the spectacle of manners rather than use manners to facilitate a social gathering.
Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan, but since the language is difficult to learn and frankly speaking nobody cares about Poland, barely anyone even knows this.
Also lots of corporations prefer "american style" approach of just refering by name (even to the CEO), so this dissapears.
Probably could write few pages about this, but nobody would care to read.
On a side note, I find interesting is that Czech language still naturally uses that plural form we abandon due to popularity of pan/pani forms.
> I'm interested in learning more about this!
It's very simple, actually.
For strangers, you use the third person and the title « Pan » or « Pani » (Sir or Lady). You avoid pronouns, « The Lady has forgotten the Lady's purse on the table ».
For friends, you use the t-form ("ty", thou), and use a diminutive rather than the full name. « Johny, you've forgotten your bag on the table ».
For work colleagues, you traditionally use « Pan » or « Pani » with the full form of the first name. « Mister John, the mister's bag is on the table ». This is perceived as old-fashioned, and is increasingly being replaced by the t-form.
The v-form has fallen into disuse, as it was promoted by the Communist regime.
(The old-fashioned honorifics still exist, but they are only used in administrative correspondence: the only time when you're "the respectable gentleman" is when you need to pay taxes.)
You left out most of the interesting things.
For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing. Someone from Finland can actually understand this topic, since Finnish has multiple cases - more than in Polish language (meanwhile English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two).
The grammar is changing in many ways (for example, the inanimate masculine is being replaced with the animated, kroić kotleta), but this was about honorifics.
Supposedly in Finish language you retained this difference and it can be heard in some words e.g. "raha" ("money" in Finish?).
Personally I never "heard" it - sounded as a regular "h" sound for me.
Reminds me of an episode on youtube of How The British Upper Class Live | Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over where the presenter eats her eggs "wrong", much to the dismay of her posh host who tells her (in his subtle British way) that she should "sort that out".
Anyone from a particularly wealthy family can probably add an additional couple contexts on the high end. Every single one of those situations has slightly different "rules" for what's acceptable.
_grape scissors_
If you must mix soup, there is a spoon, or you simply bring it to your lips and it will mix as you tilt and sip from it.
Just like the next term on the list does not prohibit eating food on the bottom but rather digging into the bowl instead of eating in top down order.
The waiter (who had a bit of a sense of humor) brought me exactly ONE chopstick. I laughed and repeated 請給我另一個筷子 (Please give me another chopstick) and he brought out another one.
Of course later my friend told me that I should have used 雙 to indicate I wanted a "pair" of chopsticks.
That's hard to guess. There are three common measure words meaning "pair"; 副 is for "pairs" that are connected, like a "pair" of scissors in English, but 双 and 对 are basically identical in significance as far as I know.
> The waiter (who had a bit of a sense of humor) brought me exactly ONE chopstick.
Slightly unfair, since 一个筷子, beyond being semantically anomalous, is more or less ungrammatical too. If you actually wanted one chopstick, you'd say 一只筷子.
What kind of path did you take that taught you how to say 另一个 before you learned about measure words?
> What kind of path did you take that taught you how to say 另一个 before you learned about measure words?
The self-taught kind. :)
That said, chopstick etiquette is definitely evolving. Something like chobujubashi isn’t enforced as strictly anymore, especially with more awareness around left-handed users. Kaeshibashi, on the other hand, is becoming more common, and in some social circles, not doing it can actually come across as rude.
I was always under the impression this was the polite thing to do.
Also I'm not sure how you're supposed to eat e.g. fried rice without yokobashi or kakibashi.
Also! I thought kaeshibashi was a good thing. I've definitely seen people do that at parties.
(Not gonna direct quote because the damn site doesn't allow copy-pasting so they don't get a link, paraphrased):
Kirai-bashi would be literally translated to "dislike-chopsticks" and means bad chopstick table-manners. Hashi is chopsticks and bashi is the voiced form of it.
So the bashi suffix/word on the end of all of these just means chopsticks it seems.
Rendaku, i.e. the voicing of the initial consonant, happens in the native Japanese words (i.e. not in the Japanese words of Chinese origin), in most cases when they are a part of a compound word and they are not the initial word. This serves indeed to distinguish a sequence of unrelated words from a compound word.
There are exceptions when rendaku does not happen, but typically whenever a word like hashi becomes a part of a compound word it will be voiced to -bashi.
"H" is a special case among the consonants, because in old Japanese it was pronounced as "p", which is why it is voiced as "b". Later, in initial positions the pronunciation was changed to "f" and even later the pronunciation was changed to "h". The "f" pronunciation has been retained only before "u", like in Fuji. In non initial positions, the original "p" has become later "v" and even later "w".
These pronunciation changes happened after the creation of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, so they were not reflected in writing. The orthographic reform that was forced after WWII has brought the written form of the words closer to the pronunciation, e.g. by writing consistently "w" where it is pronounced so. Before WWII, many words written now with "-wa-" were still written with "-ha-", a spelling that has been preserved now only in the particle "wa" (like the spelling corresponding to the old pronunciation "wo" has been preserved for the particle "o").
While the Japanese orthographic reform had some positive effects, in simplifying a little the Japanese writing, it also had the effect that for someone who knows only the modern written Japanese it is difficult to read the Japanese books published before WWII, where many different kanji are used and also their hiragana transcriptions are different.
I assume that this was actually an effect intended by the American occupation forces, as a similar policy was applied by the Russians in all the territories of the Soviet Union (except the Baltic countries), where they forced the native populations to change their writing systems to the Cyrillic alphabet, in order to make difficult for the younger generations to read anything dating from before the Russian occupation.
Well, there is a convention that syllables starting with h- are spelled with f- (in foreign transcription) if the following vowel is -u. There's not much difference in the pronunciation itself; maybe there was more of one when the spelling convention was set.
I always rub mine together, but I suppose it would be interesting to know if you didn't, how often would something bad happen? Is it more likely to hurt your mouth or your fingers?
But you move away from break apart disposable chopsticks in Japan long before you get to high etiquette dining. In my experience, basically every restaurant in Japan that isn't of, like, fast food tier, provides actual chopsticks instead of disposable ones.
That made me chuckle