YOU wake up in the morning. Your partner burps and drags on a smelly dressing gown. You can't find your toothbrush so you use his, and then wipe some muck off the floor with it. Leaving the house, you step over a turd deposited by a neighbour, then drive into a traffic jam caused by everyone ignoring the lights. In your office, everyone interrupts each other until a spitting match breaks out. Leaving work, ill-groomed strangers press up against you in the lift and one sneezes in your face.
What a grim picture. A world without manners hardly seems worth living in. Yet manners are so ingrained in our lives that we hardly notice them.
I believe they are too important to ignore. We need to better understand manners for two reasons: first, because they are a principal weapon in the war on disease, and second, because manners underpin our ...
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