Which one is the salad fork?

We're having Christmas dinner at my mother's house, with the extended family gathered around.

My 17 year old Gen Y niece is setting the table for dinner, and looks in the silverware tray and asks which one is the salad fork?

Is it time to say goodbye to dinners and dinner place settings?  Let us know your thoughts.

Photo: one of my mother's silverware trays, called "the good stuff" to identify it from the regular or daily dinnerware.

Comments

[Nancy Corum]

Instead of saying goodbye we need to pursue place settings, dinner, and etiquette in general with our children and grandchildren. Unfortunately etiquette and manners have fallen to the wayside. For the sake of the future of our children this should be part of their overall training.

[Suzanne]

At the LERN conference in Orlando Kassia Dellabough made an interesting point in one session about Generation Y and their communications style. When talking about why the way Gen Y text messages each other is not using poor English, but rather using new English she asked the audience "How many of us use 19th Century English when we speak?"

I think the point is relevant here. I think it's possible that young people haven't lost etiquette & manners - they are probably reinventing it. There are things that Boomers do that they think are polite - and interpreted by Xers as rude (and, visa versa, of course).

I don't know if formal place settings will change or not, but family dinners are certainly making a comeback. I'm a Gen X parent and so are most of my friends. We not only have family dinners just about every night (at home, cooked by mom or dad), a lot of us seem to have gotten roped into hosting the holiday dinners, too (probably because we have kids at home and therefore still live in bigger houses and have more room).

Kids today, like kids 20, 30, 40 years ago, just get a bad rap. We all think that we were perfect angels as kids and that we were familiar with formal place settings as teenagers, but we weren't. If the hippie teenagers, the goth teenagers, the burnouts, the greasers, the Madonna-wanabees and the Back Street Boys fans didn't ruin the world when they because adults, neither will today's kds.

PS. I fell into the Madonnaa-wanabee category (my poor mother!)

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[Deborah Abbott]

At Harper College, we noticed a lack of etiquette knowledge in both traditional and non-traditional students. We created a communication course in Continuing Education titled, "The Art of Etiquette," taught by Marianne Rowe-Dimas of www.yourimagefactor.com. She teaches dining etiquette, but also VM, intro., hosting, gifting and meeting etiquette. We hit the jackpot. Student ages range and the course ran it's first semester and has done well since. The students say it's not that they didn't want to know, but they were not *exposed* to the settings. In this global life where you meet people from all over the world, you need to know your etiquette to know that other countries have theirs, too.

[ann lewis]

there is nothing wrong with tradition and teaching children manners and etiquette. someday they will have to enter the real world and realise that this is what grown ups do. yes we no longer speak like the nineteenth century but we do have plenty of dumbed down speech like wanna, don'cha, gonna, ain't, etc. etc. we are now in the 'fat people in stretch pants' phase of lazy speech, is that a really such a good thing??