Amazing isn’t it, how things can change in just a few years, things I and I’m sure many readers were taught when we were young and which appear to have little or no value today.
They were the little courtesies we learned, rules for living, arrived at over many, many years, but which governed the way we all behaved in a civilised society. Rules that helped to make our passage through life easier and which took into consideration all the other people around us.
They were little things certainly, and individually they meant little to any of us, but string a few of them together and they start to make sense.
The sort of rules I am thinking about are along the lines of these:
These are just a few of the many basic rules most of us were taught as kids, many of which are now being left behind by the younger generation. I’m rather old-fashioned I suppose, but I do feel it’s sad that these things are happening.
I know the etiquette is of no real importance in today’s fast-paced electronic world, but even so these are the rules which made us a civilised society, creating boundaries which we know; they are the ‘two-times-table’ of living, rules so ingrained in most of us that we don’t even know we are using them, but they are there, guiding us all the time.
Old-fashioned ‘manners’ are going the same way as many other old rules. Spelling and grammar in schools are often considered to be unimportant, as are mathematics and history, but these subjects are the basis upon which everything else rests, I must confess it all worries me a bit. I just hope it all turns around soon and starts going back the other way — towards the life we loved.
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