"For the French aristocracy of the eighteenth century, proper comportment was the ticket of admission to the upper reaches of society. Nowadays, etiquette is often dismissed as mere window dressing: pleasant but hardly necessary — certainly not worth including in a discussion on being nice.

"But if not here, where? And if not now, when? Maybe etiquette needs redefining. 'The work of etiquette is to socialize the self,' suggests Hazel Barnes, distinguished professor emerita of philosophy at the University of Colorado. 'It reveals the values, beliefs, and presuppositions of the particular society from which it springs.'

"Barnes isn't talking about which fork to use, but something larger: what many people think of as manners. . . . For most of the past few thousand years, how we conduct ourselves has been considered a sign of character. Back in the seventeenth century, Edmund Burke, an English statesman, went so far as to call manners more important than laws. 'Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe,' he declared. 'According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.'

"Even Miss Manners — aka Judith Martin, whose droll wit and spot-on advice have made her the etiquette maven for our times — takes a similar view. Obeying the rules of etiquette, she says, 'is the oldest social virtue, and an indispensable partner of morality.' Among the first things we're taught as kids is right and wrong behavior, she points out, and etiquette informs everything we do from then on.

"Manners are a kind of diplomacy, a way of navigating through the endless loops and loopholes of our polyform, multicultural modern life."