Rude people are taking over the world – what can we do?

  • By Pat Burson / Newsday
  • Monday, January 23, 2006 9:00pm
  • Life

A man on a crowded train bellows into his cell phone about his latest sexual conquest. A couple talk nonstop during a movie – to each other and to the screen. Parents eat quietly at a restaurant while their children run around the dining room.

How rude.

There’s no getting around rude behavior. It’s everywhere, all of us have been guilty of it at one time or another, and some say it’s getting worse.

In a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, 69 percent of 1,001 adults say people are ruder today than they were 20 or 30 years ago. No big surprise there.

What is surprising, however, is after all this time, most people don’t know how to combat it.

Need proof?

In the same survey, 62 percent say they didn’t ask someone they saw behaving rudely to stop.

“We’re living in a day and age where you never know how people are going to react, if they’re going to become violent or become confrontational,” said Jacqueline Whitmore, author of “Business Class: Etiquette Essentials for Success at Work” ($19.95).

Whitmore and other experts in etiquette and manners who are leading the charge for a return to civility say the 1960s ushered in a more informal way of interacting that has been exacerbated by the way modern technology tends to insulate people from one another.

“We’re all walking around in these little bubbles, talking on the cell phone, listening to the iPod, watching a movie while we’re walking and while we’re driving,” said Thomas Farley, a senior editor at Town &Country magazine.

Those who think good manners are important will find kindred spirits among the writers in an anthology he edited called “Modern Manners: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Social Graces” ($17.95), one of several new books about etiquette and manners.

While those asked in the AP-Ipsos poll say rudeness is influenced by badly behaved celebrities, athletes and public figures, rude behavior on television shows and in movies and our own hectic lives, they fingered parents as the biggest culprits for not teaching their children good manners.

Most people want to be well mannered, but some have never been taught how. Others are in desperate need of a refresher in proper etiquette. And if those polled are any indication, most of us are saints in our own eyes, failing to see the rudeness in ourselves that we so quickly point out in others.

It’s not your job to be the manners police, experts say. For instance, how do you stop someone from spitting on the sidewalk?

And do you really want to try to reason with someone who is showing signs of road rage?

But there are ways to respond when confronted with another person’s rudeness. It’s all in your approach, experts say.

You could be praying, listening to actors on stage, riding the bus or in the workplace, and suddenly someone popping gum shatters the silence, breaks your concentration and raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

It could be a nervous habit, so don’t be so quick to deem it rude behavior, said Maximillian Wachtel, a licensed psychologist in Denver.

He suggests this approach: “Excuse me, ma’am. I’m enjoying this play, but I keep hearing you pop your gum, and I was hoping you might stop doing that so the rest of us can focus our attention.”

If you work near a gum-popper and you can’t take it anymore, you might requisition a white-noise machine for your cubicle or ask to be moved, said Leah Ingram, a certified etiquette and protocol consultant.

Ingram is also the author of “The Everything Etiquette Book: A Modern Day Guide to Good Manners” ($14.95).

“There’s only so much you can do to change someone else,” she said. “After that you have to figure out your own coping mechanisms.”

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