Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (39 page)

Wachtler, Sol

Waiter Rant
(Dublanica) Wald, Anna

walkblocking

walking tall

The Wall Street Journal
Warren, Samuel

webslapping

Weiner, Anthony

wheelchairs

“Why You Should Never Talk to the Police” (Duane) widows/widowers, dating and

winks

Wiseman, Richard

Wolfe, Tom

women

body language of

casual sex and

dating and

on Facebook

paying for dates and

rejection and

sexual misconduct toward

tips for restroom attendants and unwanted attention and

workplace

anonymous notes for conflicts in business emails

employees on Facebook

Wortman, Camille

written notes

anonymous

cruel

for neighbors

for positive shaming

thank-you

wrongdoing, admitting

Wu, Albert

Yamashiro (restaurant)

yard sales

Yelp

Yontz, David

YouTube

Alamo Drafthouse and

PooTube

“Subway Grabber”

webslapping and

Zuckerberg, Mark

ALSO BY AMY ALKON

I See Rude People: One woman’s battle

to beat some manners into impolite society

MORE PRAISE FOR
GOOD MANNERS FOR NICE PEOPLE WHO SOMETIMES SAY F*CK

“If you’re frequently left gasping by the jaw-dropping social ineptitude of your fellow human beings, or you’re guilty of being a rude jackass yourself from time to time, this is the book for you. Alkon doesn’t suffer fools lightly, but she also has the gentle wisdom to know that each of us plays the role of the fool sometimes. Armed with fascinating science, great humor, and a preternatural bullshit detector for a mind, she shoots from the hip—and you’ll be damn glad she does, too.”

—Jesse Bering, associate professor of science communication and author of
Perv

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Alkon writes “The Advice Goddess,” an award-winning, syndicated column that runs in about one hundred newspapers across the United States and Canada. She is also the author of
I See Rude People
and she has been on
Good Morning America, The Today Show,
NPR, CNN, MTV, and
Entertainment Tonight.
She has a weekly radio show called
Nerd Your Way to a Better Life! (With the Best Brains in Therapy and Research)
and has also written for
Psychology Today,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Los Angeles Times Magazine,
the New York
Daily News,
and
Pravda
, among others. She lives in Venice, California.

Visit her Web site at
advicegoddess.com
or follow her on Twitter at @amyalkon.

GOOD MANNERS FOR NICE PEOPLE WHO SOMETIMES SAY F*CK. Copyright © 2014 by Amy Alkon. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Danielle Fiorella

Cover photographs: table setting © Liesel Bockl/Getty Images; fork © Sitade/Getty Images

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Alkon, Amy.

Good manners for nice people who sometimes say f*ck / Amy Alkon.—First Edition.

pp. cm.

ISBN 978-1-250-03071-9 (trade paperback) ISBN 978-1-250030726 (e-book) 1. Courtesy—United States. 2. Etiquette—United States. I. Title.

BJ1533.C9A445 2014

395—dc23

First Edition: June 2014

NOTES

2. We’re Rude Because We Live in Societies Too Big for Our Brains

1
It actually seems to be a myth that we are born with a fear of snakes, according to research on babies by developmental psychologist Vanessa LoBue and her colleagues. We’re just—
eek
!—fast learners.

3. Communicating

2
Social Studies
, by Fran Lebowitz, Random House, 1981. But pretty much all Fran Lebowitz is worth reading.

3
There’s debate among researchers about how to define empathy. In this book, I go with social psychologist Martin Hoffman’s 2000 definition: “Psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with his own situation.” This means you don’t have to have
the exact same feeling
as the person you’re empathizing with. As the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
explains Hoffman’s definition, empathizing could just mean “feeling sad when seeing a child who plays joyfully but who does not know that (he) has been diagnosed with a serious illness.”

4
Actually, I do really well with a DustBuster, which eliminates the need to squish the buggers if you just keep the thing running and release them outside.

4. The Neighborhood

5
They aren’t lying when they say somebody will look at your complaint, but they probably mean archaeologists digging up the police station in 2121. You can improve your chances of getting their attention in the present by mentioning that there’s also a body lying bleeding on your kitchen floor. (Ideally, to avoid penalties for filing a false police report, this should be true.)

6
Anthropologist Robert Trivers came up with the term “reciprocal altruism” to describe showing generosity to another person at cost to yourself in hopes that they’ll repay you in kind at some point in the future. Absolute altruism is giving with no expectation of getting anything in return. But, as Trivers has pointed out, there’s likely no such thing as baseless altruism. If you’re sacrificing for somebody related to you, it benefits your genetic line, and if you’re sacrificing for somebody unrelated, you get a reputational bump out of the deal if others see what you’re doing and probably at least a self-respect bump if they don’t.

7
Be sure you do have video of them in action in case they try to go after you for “defamation,” because truth is the defense against that.

8
For best results, no, don’t actually call them that in your note.

5. The Telephone

9
Physics of the Future
, by Michio Kaku, Doubleday, 2011.

10
Your telepathy plan may or may not come with thought-waiting.

11
The briefer the better, like my friend Max Ferguson’s “Machine, beep, etcetera.”

12
Amazon tribes actually communicate by drumbeats, which I find rather inconsiderate, since “smoke signals” ends this paragraph funnier.

13
Kenneth Terrell and Sara Hammel wrote in
U.S. News & World Report
in 1999: “During a performance last March of the Broadway play
The Lion in Winter,
an audience member’s cell phone rang. After putting up with the annoyance for 20 seconds, actor Laurence Fishburne stopped the scene and boomed: ‘Will you turn off that f—ing phone, please?’ He got a rousing ovation.”

14
Amazingly, when I was growing up in the Midwest, my dad managed to go to the supermarket for my mother without trotting out to the pay phone numerous times.

15
One night at the supermarket, a guy a few people ahead of me in a long checkout line got up to the cashier. He might’ve greeted her, but his phone rang, and he flipped it open and barked, “DUUUUDE!” On Sunday night. At 8 p.m. At the ’hood-adjacent supermarket we locals call “The Ghetto Ralphs.” (I’ll hazard a guess that he wasn’t answering because he’s the one with the missile launch codes.)

16
Some regulars have grown so reliant on me for cellboor-muzzling that if I have my headphones on, they’ll wave to get my attention and then point to whoever’s on their cell so I’ll go over and tell them it’s against the rules.

17
Look for apps, like DriveSafe.ly, that you can set up to automatically read you texts as they come in and automatically message those texting you to let them know you are driving and will get back to them when you stop.

6. The Internet

18
There are privacy settings you can activate so you have to approve all photos that go on your Timeline, but remember that Facebook’s default settings are generally “Y’all come have a look!”

19
As Jim Emerson writes on
RogerEbert.com
, “Petraeus and Broadwell used the Drafts folder of a joint Gmail account to exchange sexually explicit messages. They were aware enough to want to hide what they were doing by not actually sending e-mails that could be traced, but apparently naïve enough not to realize that this trick is known to terrorists and teenagers the world over.”

Ryan Gallagher adds on
Slate,
“If the lovers had only ever logged into their pseudonymous Gmail accounts using anonymity tools like Tor, their real IP addresses would have been masked and their identities extremely difficult to uncover.”

20
A
sudden
desire for privacy in a person who’s always been open may be reason for suspicion.

21
Disgustingly, some sites and phone apps won’t even ask before sucking up your address book—a situation some privacy activists have fought to change.

22
My boyfriend at one point claimed that he was starting a nihilistic social network called Quitter: “Posts are zero characters, and you’re asked not to join.”

23
I, of course, got Virginia’s permission to publish this.

24
A suggestion blogged by “The FourHour WorkWeek’s” Tim Ferriss,
fourhourworkweek.com
.

25
David Yontz, host of the podcast “Stop!… Grammar Time” and the grammar ninja who copyedits my syndicated column, gave me a short list of commonly made grammatical errors to check for before you hit SEND (and maybe google and read up on so you can internalize what is grammatically correct). In addition to confusing “you’re” and “your,” people tend to mix up “it’s” and “its” and “myself” and “me” and start a sentence with “her” or “him” instead of the correct “he” or “she.” And finally, in Dave’s words: “Do not sign off with a ‘Thanks, (Your Name).’ You’re not thanking yourself. Make sure you add a paragraph break after the comma.”