Bollocks.

Flipping through the channels today, I stumbled across a show about a woman who charges something ridiculous like $700 an hour to teach people ‘proper etiquette’.

Well, etiquette can suck my balls.

You see, there’s a huge difference between manners and etiquette. Manners are all well and good, they cover things like not eating with your mouth open, flicking peas across the room with your fork or eating a sit-down meal with your hands.

Etiquette, on the other hand, is just a bunch of made up, nonsensical rules that were designed by people for the express purpose of making other people who don’t know them feel inadequate.

Etiquette is for the country-club crowd, the ones who feel the fact that their great, great, great, great grandfather actually worked for a living and made a ton of money somehow makes them better than everyone because they inherited it.

I have a theory that those kind of people are incredibly insecure. They know deep down that the only reason they’re rich is because someone else had enough brains to make a lot of money. They know that if they were left in the real world and had to actually work for a living they wouldn’t stand a chance…but by God they can look down their nose and feel superior to people who don’t know you’re supposed to use the chilled, long tined fork for the salad and the short spoon for the caviar.

Etiquette is just a bunch of bullshit, made up rules. Does it really matter if you use the wrong fork? The only thing that’s important when it comes to cutlery is if the implement you’re using is clean and suited to the task you’re using it for. Even then, if you can somehow eat a steak with a plastic spoon, more power to you.