When I was a child, my mother (traditional Southern woman that she was) enrolled me in an etiquette class for children called "White Gloves and Party Manners." Bratty little Yankee know-it-all that I was (this being 1970 or so), I thought it was the most absurd waste of time I'd ever been forced to endure.
Etiquette got a bad rap then, and to a certain extent it still does. It is seen in many quarters as patrician, elitist, a vestige of a society based upon class distinctions and a mechanism for institutionalized snobbery.
CHICAGO (AP) — When he sentenced Dennis Hastert to more than a year in prison, the judge in the former House speaker's hush-money case delivered the verbal equivalent of a public flogging.
Before imposing the 15-month sentence, a far stiffer sentence than federal guidelines suggested, U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin spent nearly an hour Wednesday rebuking the 74-year-old Republican for sexually abusing high school athletes decades ago, when he was a wrestling coach.
