A. At the table. Table manners

Manners are a set of rules that allow the person to engage in a social ritual – or to be excluded from one. And table manners, specially, originated in part as a means of telling a host that it was an honour to be eating his or her meal.

Etiquette watchers today claim that dining standards at an all-time low for this century. As a cause, they cite the demise of the traditional English meal, when families gathered to eat and parents were quick to pounce on errant behavior. They also point to the popularity of ready-to-eat meals (often consumed quickly and in private) and the growth of fast-food restaurants, where, at least among adolescents, those who display table manners can become social outcasts. When young people value individual statement over social decorum, manners don’t have a chance.

Evidence of the decline comes from surprisingly diverse quarters. Army generals and corporative executives have complained that new recruits and MBA graduates reveal an embarrassing confusion about formal manners at the table. This is one reason cited for sudden appearance of etiquette books on best-seller lists.

The problem, though, is not new. Historians who chart etiquette practices claim that deterioration of formal manners in America began a long time ago – specifically, with Thomas Jefferson and his fondness for equality and his hatred of false civility Jefferson, who had impeccable manners himself, often deliberately downplayed them. And during his presidency, he attempted to ease the rules of protocol in the capital, feeling they imposed artificial distinctions among people created equal.

But before manners can be relaxed or abused, they have to be conceived and formalized, and those processes originated centuries ago.

Early man, preoccupied with foraging for food, which was scarce, had no time for manners; he ate stealthily and in solitude. But with the dawn of agriculture in the Near East, about 9000 B.C., man evolved from hunter-gathering to farmer. He settled down in one place to a more stable life. As food became plentiful, it was shared communally, and rules were developed for its preparations and consumption. One family’s daily habits at the table became the next generation’s customs.

Historical evidence for the first code of correct behaviour comes from the Old Kingdom of Egypt, in a book, The Instructions of Ptahhotep ( Ptahhotep was grand visier under the pharaon Isesi). Written about 2500 B.C., the manuscript on manners now resides in a Paris antiquities collection.

Known as the “Prisse papyrus” – not that it dictates on decorum are prissy; an archaeologist by that name discovered the scrolls – the work predates the Bible by about two thousand years. It reads as if it was prepared as advice for young Egyptian men climbing the social ladder of the day. In the company of one’s superior, the book advises, ”Laugh when he laughs.” It suggests overlooking one’s quiddities with a superior’s philosophy, “so thou shalt be very agreeable to his heart.” And there are numerous references to the priceless wisdom of holding one’s tongue, first with a boss: “Let thy mind be deep and thy speech scanty, ” then with a wife: “Be silent, for it is a better gift than flowers.”

By the time the assemblage of the Bible began, around 700 B.C. Ptahhotep’s two- thousand- year-old wisdom had been well circulated throughout the Nile delta of Egypt and the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia. Religious scholars have located strong echoes of The Instructions throughout the Bible, especially in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes – and particularly regarding the preparation and consumption of food.