Headline in a recent Saint Louis Today:
Dining with your phone at the table is a sign of bad manners
That formulation goes to the semiotic metalevel, which is
uncalled-for. Laying your cell on the table when dining with
others, is in itself bad
manners, or else it is not; it is not (or need not be) a clue to further
misbehaviors.
(Conceivably there is, empirically, in this case, some
actual correlation between phone-flashing and such other
too-busy-to-care-about-you behaviors as cutting people off in traffic, or
going through the express lane with twice the number of posted items, but the
article does not assert these. It is interested purely in the etiquette
of conversation and telephony.)
To make the distinction clear: It is not, per
se, bad manners to drive any one particular marque of automobile, or to
wear any given brand of clothing, or to patronize any special restaurant.
But such choices do indeed track statistically
with other behaviors: indeed, most readers could readily come up with a
profile of which SUVs are driven by louts and boors, while how clad,
on their way to what deplorable eatery.
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