restore politeness, refinement, tact and other old-fashioned niceties

I don’t know how to feel about this article that speaks about the demise of cursive handwriting among American schoolchildren.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001475.html

The curmudgeonly old-person in me says “yeah, that’s terrible – everyone using keyboards and no one writing!” But the realist in my acknowledges that I almost never write anything in English that is longer than a list. I used to actually practice my English cursive when I was a kid (dorky!) but I think things started to go downhill when I started learning foreign languanges with non-Latin alphabets – particularly Russian, which has some letters that look similar to English (both in print and in cursive) but that are totally different – “H” for example makes and “N” sound in Russian. And in cursive, the lower case of the letter that makes a “D” sound looks very similar to a cursive lower case English “G”. I think eventually I just gave up on English cursive because I forgot how to write so many of the letters properly. Even now, I write in a mix of printed and cursive letters, with no consistently – sometimes the “s” is printed, sometimes cursive – sometimes both within the same word.

I wonder if it matters?

Essential Manners for Couples: From Snoring and Sex to Finances and Fighting Fair-What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006077665X/ref=wl_it_dp/104-7813506-5938313?ie=UTF8&coliid=IS8DNU3ZDDT5B&colid=TCLXZ6R4N86K

Manners extend to everyone, even those closest to us. I know that sounds obvious and paradoxical, but I think sometimes manners are looked at as those things that we put on when we leave the house and we treat our homelives like the place where we can be ourselves, sometimes with rude results.

How in the world does one deflect unwanted advice about one’s religious preferences or lack thereof?

This seems to me to be the height of rudeness and unwanted intervention. It happens to me fairly often once people discover that I was a religion major in college – at a liberal arts college where I studied everything from Buddhism to Judaism to Islam from a detached ACADEMIC perspective. No, I do not want to be a nun. And no, not that its any of your business, but I am not personally religious, though I do not have a problem with those who are. Oh, no, please, do not try to convince me that your religion is the best and that my life is meaningless without a form of personal faith (preferably yours).

And these are random people to whom I am not close. Like the shuttle bus driver at my old office or the woman who cuts (or rather, used to cut, my hair).

What in the world can one say to these people that won’t come off sounding defensive or horrible?