"Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet." -- Judith Martin
Judith Martin (née Perlman, born September 13, 1938), better known by the pen name Miss Manners, is an American journalist, author, and etiquette authority. Martin's uncle was the distinguished economist and labor historian Selig Perlman.
"Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution.""Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress.""Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.""If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.""Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.""It's far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.""Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.""Most people who work at home find they do not have the benefit of receptionists who serve as personal guards.""Parents should conduct their arguments in quiet, respectful tones, but in a foreign language. You'd be surprised what an inducement that is to the education of children.""There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.""We already know that anonymous letters are despicable. In etiquette, as well as in law, hiring a hit man to do the job does not relieve you of responsibility.""We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.""When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.""You do not have to do everything disagreeable that you have a right to do.""You glance at an e-mail. You give more attention to a real letter."
Martin was born and spent a significant part of her childhood in Washington, D.C. where she still lives and works, graduating from Georgetown Day School. She lived in various foreign capitals as a child, as her father, a United Nations economist, was frequently transferred. She is a graduate of Wellesley College with a degree in English. Before she began the advice column, she was a journalist, covering social events at the White House and embassies; she then became a theater and film critic. Martin is known among Star Wars fans for her less-than-adulatory review of The Empire Strikes Back, which she referred to as a "good junk movie" with "no plot structure, no character ... development, no ... original vision of the future".
Since 1978 she has written an advice column, which is distributed three times a week by United Features Syndicate and carried in more than 200 newspapers worldwide. In the column, she answers etiquette questions contributed by her readers and writes short essays on problems of manners, or clarifies the essential qualities of politeness.
Judith Martin writes about the ideas and intentions underpinning seemingly simple rules, providing a complex and advanced perspective, which she refers to as "heavy etiquette theory". Her columns, noted for their admonishing tone and sarcasm, as well as their broad knowledge of history and customs and their applications to the problems of today, have been collected in a number of books. In her writings, Martin refers to herself in the third person, e.g. "Miss Manners hopes..."
In a 1995 interview by Virginia Shea, Miss Manners said,
"You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, 'We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!' Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable."
Martin was the recipient of a 2005 National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. On March 23, 2006, she was a special guest correspondent on The Colbert Report, giving her analysis of the manners with which the White House Press Corps spoke to the President.
Some of Martin's writings were collected and set to music by Dominick Argento in his song cycle Miss Manners on Music. Argento excerpt
Since its launch in 2008, Judith Martin has been a contributor for wowOwow, a website for women to talk culture, politics, and gossip.
