Peg puff: A young woman with the manners of an old one (Old Scots language)

Who knew that there was even a term like peg puff? Archaic now, I’m starting a campaign to bring it back. We need more peg puffs, and we need the language of the past to remind us, once again, of the power and value in good manners.

Of course, I admit that I am one who grieved for days after I finished the last episode of the last season of Downton Abbey. This was a world that could be literally falling apart, and you still dressed for dinner. This was a world in which there was something larger and more valuable than yourself. And although this world had legitimate–and sometimes tragic–flaws, those who lived in it, both the upstairs and the downstairs folk, generally shared a sense of what was right and what was true. Manners mattered in this world and mattered deeply.

Today, we are parched for manners, our sense of otherness withering under the sun of self. I recall telling a class of high school students that when people speak, we should look at them. Twenty-three juniors looked at me, amazed and puzzled. “But you can still listen without looking at someone. I do it all the time,” said one young woman. Her peers nodded knowingly. Still, I persisted. I explained how most adults expected eye contact, how it was a hallmark of courtesy and conscious engagement with another. In this teachable moment, I told them that, in spite of how they felt, their future employers, their military officers, their college professors, and the adult world at large valued face-to-face human contact and would consider their failure to look them in the eyes as a mark of rudeness and arrogance. I may have convinced a few, but I left the others mildly amused and wholly skeptical.

Miss Manners, Emily Post herself, writes:

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use. 

Clearly, manners are more about people than cutlery. They demand a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. A true peg puff puts herself in another’s position and, before speaking or acting, asks herself this: How would I feel if. . . And if the answer is that she wouldn’t like it or that she would be hurt by this, she softens her words and tone and acts with restraint. Never a pushover, the peg puff is ever aware of how her words and acts affect those around her. When she must confront or correct another, she does so with civility and compassion. A peg puff is not one for sarcasm, name-calling, or unsubstantiated accusations. These are the tools of the ill-mannered.

Horace Mann claimed that manners easily and rapidly mature into morals. As illogical and silly as it seems, I’ve heard many adolescents argue that they will develop and use good manners and good morals when they need to. So the incivility, the habitual disregard for others, the all-about-me-ness that may characterize their K-12 years will magically morph into civility and regard for others after graduation? Right! And I have some prime real estate in the Everglades that I’m willing to let go for a song. . .

Recently, two Google studies–Project Oxygen and Project Aristotle–reveal that the demand for “soft skills” has trumped even the demand for STEM skills. In his article, “English Majors Among Most Desirable Employees, Says Google,” Emer McKeon writes:

‘Project Oxygen’ concluded that among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in last. The top characteristics of success at Google are so-called “soft skills,” such as communication, good leadership, possessing insight into others’ values and points of view, having empathy and a supportive nature towards others and possessing good critical thinking and problem-solving skills, along with the ability to create connections across complex ideas.

For Google and other employers, a peg puff would be a top contender for almost any position. Possessing insight into others’ values and points of view? Check. Having empathy and a supportive nature towards others? Check. Communication, leadership, and critical thinking may be taught. But the willingness and ability to consider others and their perspectives? Not so much. This, any true peg puff understands, is rarely taught and more often bred.

Interestingly enough, however, these particular soft skills (the ones that concern good manners) are increasingly taught in schools and workplaces today. Our collective failure to develop and nurture these skills at home has resulted in the expectation that schools will take up the mantle. Because they are in the business of preparing students for the world beyond the classroom, we have come to believe that schools must teach students how to consider others’ feelings and perspectives and how to respectfully disagree. In almost any school today, a peg puff will shine. She will rise above the crush of demanding, impolite peers as a lady in the truest sense of the word. Others will offer her the key to the city, perhaps to the entire world. And with gloved hand, she will humbly accept it.

And what of our apparent failure to raise boys and girls, men and women of good manners? In Utopia, English lawyer, philosopher, and saint Thomas More writes:

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

What else to is to be concluded but that we have first made ill-educated, ill-mannered individuals and then we punish them for their ignorance and incivility? Ouch. Writing in the 16th century, More’s words may have been true for his age, but how much more true are they today? While many lament the rudeness that pervades schools and workplaces, government and media, More might argue, what else is to be concluded from this corruption of manners but that you first make thieves and then you punish them? 

Recently, I listened as my granddaughter expressed concern that one of her classmates might feel badly that she didn’t have something that Gracyn had gotten for Christmas. How could I begin to tell her that this awareness of others’ feelings would distinguish her among so many others? How could I begin to describe how my heart bloomed in the wake of her empathy? And in an ill-mannered world, how will I begin to protect and sustain the burgeoning peg puff that she is?