When the manners expert is unaccountably snooty... and wrong.

Miss Manners, at WaPo — answering some question about how to eat haricot verts and informing us that haricots verts means string beans — adds a snarky parenthetical: "(Considering the number of people who think 'RSVP' is a noun, Miss Manners is not going to trust that everyone passed high school French.)"

First, passing a high school course doesn't signify much knowledge. What do you have to do to fail? Surely not enough to ensure you know the phrase underlying the initialism "RSVP." I'll bet you could pass without even knowing how to say "please."

But more importantly, is there anything about French that makes it wrong for a person speaking English to use "RSVP" as a noun? I find my answer in the Oxford English Dictionary:

"After my young husband died... I was bereft. I thought I'd never go out again, much less all alone."

So begins a comment on an advice column dealing with a letter from somebody who felt disturbed by restaurants hosts who asks "Just one?"

The columnist, Miss Manners (in WaPo), though the letter-writer was imagining more negativity than the hosts really intended to express.

But I'm interested in this comment. It continues:

"And jeans, while pleasant for some, are like sausage casings for others. A good high-necked dress or a suit and tie may be genuinely more comfortable."

"(Miss Manners has more than one gentleman friend who prefers to wear the latter while aboard an airplane — or even while taking a nap.)"

From a Miss Manners Q&A (in WaPo) answering a question from a woman who doesn't like comments from her friends about how she's "overdressed" when she's really — or so she says — dressing for comfort.

"Your 7-year-old has perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the moment. Righting wrongs — and there are always more than enough to choose from — is virtuous..."

"... if sometimes humorless. But inventing infractions merely to put people in the wrong is not." 

The advice columnist "Miss Manners" answers a woman whose daughter chided her for using the automatic door button when she is not disabled.

The words "Your 7-year-old has perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the moment" feel humorous, and I hope the girl has a frivolous foible that she will outgrow. Or maybe she has a sense of humor and the mother is the humorless one who's overly afflicted by the zeitgeist. But it's terrifying to think that Generation Alpha is going to be grimly looking for meaningless micro-offenses.

I've said it before — I'm investing my hope in the babies — "those who will be born over the next 5 years, and kids up to the age of 10": "What are these people going to be like — after living through the lockdown and witnessing the heightened, hysterical, hypocritical empathy of the millennials." I said: "I was hoping they rebel against the prudery and the repression of the millennials."

But what if they lean into the worst tendencies of the millennials and Gen Z?