Emily Post website helps us mind our manners

Emily Post website helps us mind our manners

After a year of relative isolation for so many of us, we’re finally getting back together in social situations.

And I sincerely hope we haven’t forgotten our manners during the health crisis — although the state of the please-and-thank-you-and-you’re-welcome world seems precarious at best.

Whatever happened to etiquette? Where are the books on deportment? Has anyone lately thumbed through the famous etiquette book written in 1992 by the late Emily Post?

Emily was a Post, but a distant cousin — a 21st cousin, in fact — to Marjorie Merriweather Post, the fabled hostess who built and entertained at Mar-a-Lago.

The late Amy Vanderbilt also was an authority on etiquette, with her book on manners making its debut in 1952 and later updated. Amy was a distant cousin of fashion and style icon Gloria Vanderbilt — but very distant.

When Emily Post wrote her book “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home,” it was a best-seller. Through it, folks learned how to place silverware on the dining table. They learned the importance of sending a handwritten thank-you note. And they learned the proper way of addressing a letter.

The descendants of the Post family are carrying on Emily’s tradition with a podcast titled “Awesome Etiquette,” which can be found, among other places, at EmilyPost.com. The family business is today guided by cousins Lizzie Post (Emily's great-great-granddaughter) and Dan Post Senning (her great-great-grandson).

1 comment

  • Marsha Carol Watson Gandy on

    I’m so Delighted to receive this email about Emily Post!. I inherited my mother: Carolyn Bass Watson Dickens
    ETIQUETTE Emily Post copyright 1937 by Funk and Wagnalls Company. To me—-it is a PRICELESS TREASURE! And I have referred to it on numerous occasions since my mother “Graduated” to Heaven.

    I will most joyfully go to EmilyPost.com and have a “Banquet Feast” of updates that each of us so needs in our current day and time.

    During our past year of being primarily closed in due to COVID-19—-I found this time to be not really “confining”—-but to be a time of deep reflection and calling forth PRECIOUS MEMORIES of my lifetime of now 76 years as of last week.

    My mother said throughout my lifetime: “People are about as happy as they want to be.” Her quote

    I have lived long enough to know this is Absolute Truth.

    My maternal grandmother taught me to write letters and notes….She “programmed” me that way, and I have made it a life long habit. Thank you so very much for the information on Emily Post. I will surely Enjoy the visit to her website.

    Most sincerely,

    Marsha Carol Watson Gandy
    Sylvester, Georgia

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