Manners
(1) The practice of courtesy, of encounter with the other’s space and values, of tact and good humour, of acute observation, of listening to what a person is saying and—if really necessary—even reading what he has written before disagreeing with it. Manners spill over benignly into adjacent fields, directed not only towards the other person, but to the natural environment and to oneself.
(2) The whole behaviour of people—their thought and action, the way they go about things, the defining qualities of a person’s existence.
The word “manners” has an early history in the ancient Sanskrit word manu, meaning “thinker”. In due course it came to mean “hand”—as for instance in the Latin (manus) and French (main)—because “thinking”, when applied, means doing something with your hands (or getting someone else to do so).
But thinking-and-doing is what makes a person, so the same word surfaces again in “man”, meaning “people”, as in the Germanic (manna) and Alemannic (itself meaning “all [or at least a wide alliance of] tribes”). And the root of “human” is the Latin homo (man).
If we trace through the tangled threads of inference that make language, man and manners turn out to be the same thing: the craft of thinking.
Related entries:
Introduction > Manners, Politeness, Civility, Conversation, Encounter, Deference, Logic.
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