Coming of age during Covid was no joke, so don’t mock young people for trying to establish a few rules of polite behaviour
In my innocence, I thought the very concept of etiquette had long been banished to social Siberia. It would appear not. New York magazine’s The Cut recently published 140 rules on new social etiquette. While some may have responded with giddy excitement, others mocked the guide as a “woke” Debrett’s of generation Z carping and nitpicking. A NY Post columnist lambasted the rules as “deeply infantilising”.
Whatever happened to the freedom of youth? we wailed. Laying the law down on everything from dating, parenting, privilege and misgendering to tipping, mask wearing , posting and hosting, this seemed less generation Z and more generation Zzz, or Generation Take-a-Chill-Pill. With the debate still raging, I wonder: has this list sparked yet another bout of intergenerational misunderstanding?
