I think if you were to do an Osaka version of this, the list would be limited to maybe 4 of these (licking, chopsticks upright in rice, passing between chopsticks, and pointing esp. toward a senior would be taboo).
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'm not sure I'd put it down entirely to Osaka versus Kyoto. My impression is that these things often have at least as much to do with upbringing, formality, and social background as with region.
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.
Some of them of course are invented whole cloth. British Received Pronunciation was invented and needs to be learned and is the standard of the upper class. It's neither right nor wrong but it's there to differentiate.
RP isn't really a thing any more, except among some of the older aristocracy and Tories and a few legacy BBC Radio shows.
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.
Idk. I’m in my early 40s, not a Tory, not aristocracy, and I speak with RP, as do many others I know. Maybe a product of schooling, but I wouldn’t say it’s dead.
In media, you’re quite correct - it has become rare bar presenters who are now in their 80s or older.
You say “needs to be learned” but that’s no more so than any other accent.
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.
It's not the natural evolution of a regional dialect coming to prominence but rather the conscious consensus of a geographically distributed social stratum.
Interestingly, the sociolinguistic literature shows that such a consensus is strongest among an aspirationally upward-mobile social group rather than the already social elite. In other words: The aspirational middle class make a big effort to speak how they think the upper class speak in hopes of joining them one day.
Maybe some of them may have had a purpose. With this one, if you were used to putting your elbows on the table and there were more people around, you just took up too much space and made it unpleasant for others around you.
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.
> the standards are there, wishing they didn't exist doesn't invalidate them
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.
It seems like you are making a different point than the other posters. If the majority of a group does not follow an etiquette standard, it is reasonable to say that the group does not hold that standard. Your point that if any group holds an etiquette standard, then that standard exists is true, but is more tangential to the other point that a rebuttal of it.
That might be true for things like laws, but manners and customs are not strictly enforced by any central authority, at least these days, but rather by how culture/generation changes. It is possible that if nobody follows the same etiquette anymore, it means it is outdated and no longer exists. That is the entire point of progress.
At one point in time, it was considered bad etiquette to interact with people of color, but over time, society changed for the better. That etiquette literally doesn't exist anymore. That doesn't mean people are "getting away with" not following a "rule" these days. But rather customs/morals/etiquette are transitory and prone to changes, and one must understand what is and what isn't actual etiquette instead of just following all outdated "rules".
That's also fundamentally different from something like a law, where the ethical thing to do is that you should still follow it even if others are "getting away" with it.
"Appeals to public opinion are valid in situations where consensus is the determining factor for the validity of a statement, such as linguistic usage and definitions of words."
And the point of etiquette is to signal conformity and social status.
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.
In general, upper-classish dining probably used to be more formal in the US in terms of cutlery type and placement and other things. May still be in some circles but no one I know worries about such things and even very decent restaurants don’t. And when was the last time you saw a fish fork?
My mother-in-law always used to get annoyed at me for using my knife and fork in the European manor instead of the American way. She said it was boorish. I don't know anybody else here in the US who cares in the least which way you use your knife and fork, so I always interpreted it left over behavior from her upper class DC upbringing in the 1930-40's.
(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.)
I thought this would simply be about the knife and the fork switching hands, but holding the fork tines up or down (spearing vs scooping) is new to me.
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.
This is bonkers. Just cut the food with your non-dominant hand. If you're so weak that you cannot cut the food with your non-dominant hand then you're either a small child, elderly, or you have a medical condition.
You obviously haven’t done it both ways and are assuming that spearing requires more dexterity than cutting. Hilarious that you could just try it for yourself and figure out that knife in the dominant hand works well but choose instead to bore everyone with your ignorance and stunning closemindedness
Do you always get fish served deboned? Cutting it with non-dominant hand sucks, especially more bony ones like trout. For me doing almost anything with my non dominant part sucks, my left hand is 20x less useful.
Just guessing here, I'm left handed also. I don't trust myself to cut a piece of steak using the knife in my right hand. So, after cutting with my left hand, I put the knife down and use my left for forking.
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.)
I remember being blown away when I was in a Kyoto Familymart after a few months of living in Osaka after they handed me my fried chicken very delicately with both hands like it was a business card!
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.
Similar in Spain between Andalusia doing trades since forever across the whole Mediterranean Sea vs the inner provinces (the Castille-s) and the chilly Atlantic North regions with Celtic/Basque substrates.
Do you know how serious "chopsticks upright in rice" is? I had a Chinese teacher who mentioned the taboo (with regard to China, not Japan), but she also said that while people recognize that it's something you're not supposed to do, it's not taken seriously either.
I do. My parents (americans) lived between HK and Taiwan for a decade before I was born, and growing up, I was fortunate enough to have my folks teach me a bit of chinese. We'd regularly go to a local Chinese restaurant where the staff would speak to me in Chinese so I could practice speaking. Seeing as some of the staff were significantly older, my dad taught me to be hyper aware of customs surrounding dining norms and etiquette. One day I accidentally left my chopsticks in the rice bowl while there was still rice in it, and the waitress (an older Chinese lady) saw it - poor lady nearly fainted.
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 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
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.
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.
I wonder what Ms. Kyoto would tell me to do to properly pick up my chopsticks, given that I’m left-handed, and yet it is apparently a faux pas to lay down the chopsticks pointing to the right.
I think if, 10 years ago, you spun Microsoft into several different companies with everything playing out exactly as it has today in the product management side, the most direct consumer-facing sections like Windows Desktop and Xbox would have cratered and most analysts would say that they have bleak futures, while Azure and 365 would have grossly overperformed and would have been titans.
MS has been successful despite fucking up the monolithic position they held in desktop and gaming, because they managed to find a particularly valuable golden goose. It's just that in doing so they allowed the other golden geese they have to become quite sick.
If you took out cloud rev MS would have been much more motivated to not let the rest of the company's products turn in to the sorry state they're in.
Most client PC are still running on Microslop Windows.
They are, as always, using Windows to sell all their other crap, especially Azure and 365. Things like their AD or office tools are tightly integrated into the cloud so you realistically can't even use the one without using the other.
At work, we needed a PC for a Linux-based Webkiosk the other day. The computer proposed by the colleague who actually orders stuff comes with a Windows license. I said we don't need that. A fruitless, lame effort was made to locate a substitute w/o a Windows license. I renewed my protest, but the feeling that the problem is me was already floating in the air. I gave up. We purchased a Windows license to run Linux. For the umpteenth time.
It's like a Microsoft tax on PCs.
Those OEM licenses do seem quite cheap. I think it was Dell who gave an option for a while. To remove the Windows license and have Ubuntu instead only saved $10.
It was low enough where I think most buyers questioned if it would be worth it to have the license just incase.
Tesla has been this for a long time since the price fundamentally does not reflect the quality or future of the company, yet the road is littered with dead Tesla bears.
Efficient markets hypothesis breaks down with Musk companies.
Agree they’re great but it does fascinate me when there are weird edge cases that Apple mess up.
For example if I have my phone and laptop running, and I’m listening to something on my phone, I pause with my AirPods, and then I unpause with my AirPods, instead of what was playing on my phone resuming through my AirPods, a video that I’ll have forgotten about will instead play through my laptop speakers, and pressing pause on my AirPods will do nothing and I have to interrupt whatever I’m doing to pause on the laptop. Possible they’ve fixed this specific issue though since I’ve learned to not have anything that has media controls open on my laptop.
The cross platform control stuff is probably very hard and usually works though.
I gave up on USBC headphones because if your port becomes full of lint (say by being in your pocket all day), it doesn’t take much to disturb a USBC connection and cause it to go through the whole handshake all over again for a few seconds.
Compared to 3.5mm where the frustrations I remember were usually limited to sometimes getting a bit of a crackle or one of the audio channels dropping out and worst case scenario you just unplugged it and put it back in and it usually worked. With USBC you have to wait to see.
Gut cleanses are probably stupid but I wonder if people would benefit from taking antiparasitics prophylactically. It's not something I've ever done, but I eat sashimi pretty regularly and wonder if I should take something like praziquantel because I'm probably at risk for Japanese broad tapeworm, and the symptoms are mild enough I can't really tell without testing, but the price of actually testing is much higher than just taking a drug with a great safety profile.
For similar reasons, I also wonder about people who consume raw milk. These people are more likely to endorse ivermectin for e.g. covid, because it made them feel much better. Maybe it's possible these people aren't lying about that, but not because it cured their covid.
Gut cleanses is really just a herbal medicine protocol you do for a few weeks. Herbal medicine is not stupid, it has been used for thousands of years. Hell even some pharmaceutical drugs use herbs.
Better yet, a link to Kaggle and provide prize funding for a few dozen competitions with most of them open to UK residents only. Directly incentivise the most driven types of people to compete and learn and give local firms a way to identify talent.
But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
You could have contracted 5 small firms for £400k each (which, for this project seems frankly seems excessive) and even if a couple failed to deliver you'd have gotten 3 separate products to choose the best quality one from, £148k to legally chase up the firms who failed to deliver, and still had £2 million left over.
I agree a good solution isn't easy to come up with, but the status quo is certainly an outrageously awful one.
I'm struggling to follow the logic on this. Glocks are used in murders, Proton has been used to transmit serious threats, C has been used to program malware. All can be legitimate tools in professional settings where the users don't use it for illegal stuff. My Leatherman doesn't need to have a tipless blade so I don't stab people because I'm trusted to not stab people.
The only reason I don't use Grok professionally is that I've found it to not be as useful for my problems as other LLMs.
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.
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