I often wonder what possesses certain Persons, members of Modern Society, to launch impassionated, heated arguments with others in public.
I’m not talking about a simple disagreement with the waiter over how well done one’s dinner is, or pointing out to the dry cleaner that they missed that spot on the collar—again.
Perhaps an illustration drawn from Real Life: the other day I was in the supermarket when I noticed a young woman, her gentleman companion (I couldn’t honestly tell if they were married or not, although his baseball-cap-worn-backwards and his oversized trousers clearly marked him out as the shiftless type) and their small child, appeared in the main foyer of the store. The young woman immediately launched into a violent argument with the young man while simultaneously talking on her cellular telephone to person or persons unknown. I saw them coming towards me and, not wishing to be rude, ducked down another aisle in order to allow them some (relative) privacy in which to complete their disagreement.
I might have saved myself the bother. Rather than attempting to tie up their argument or, as good manners might dictate, to save it until they were in the privacy of their own domicile, they increased both the volume and the violence of their argument until practically everyone in the store was effectively apprised of the most intimate details of their disagreement.
Miss Dimity wonders: what happened to manners? What happened to holding one’s tongue in public, with keeping a civil tongue in one’s head? What happened to not airing one’s dirty laundry in public? And for the record, when did telephones cease to become stationary objects affixed to a hole in the wall and become, instead, something by which the insecure and desperately attention-seeking among us place an audio spotlight intractably upon themselves?
One does not argue in public. One does not pick fights with one’s spouse (or, in this case, one’s baggy trouser wearing ne’er-do-well) in a place where other persons are attempting to complete their shopping in a quiet and peaceful manner. Indeed, by ducking down another aisle I had hoped to not only give them privacy but also to avoid them: I did not care to hear the young woman’s (I won’t call her a young lady; she was anything but a lady) repeated imprecations of “Excuse you? Excuse YOU? I’ll excuse you!” while I attempted to differentiate between a seeded domestic cucumber and a seedless English one. More to the point, I should not have to endure such ridiculous spectacle in a public place. If one wishes to conduct heated arguments, one may do so in the privacy of one’s own home.
And until one can learn to behave appropriately outside of one’s own home, one should perhaps stay there.
Something similar happened to me in a restaurant not long ago. A young lady and a gentleman were eating at a table near mine. The young lady was very distressed about something and kept weeping as she recounted her tale of woe to her companion. It was very irritating, as her voice was shaking so much that I could only hear half of what she was saying, so I never did get to the bottom of her trouble. I would have preferred not to hear it at all, but since she felt the need to share, I think good manners required her to speak clearly enough that all who were hearing half of her choked sentences also heard the other half. Inflicting such a passion of unsatisfied curiosity on us all was unsporting.
Precisely so! Or, if they must argue in public, make it an interesting argument, rather than the same tired old drivel about who said what to whom…