“Never put your knife in your mouth, as not only is this bad manners, but the knife may be sharp.”
- PAUL'S Guide to Manners
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| This sheitel head looks like it's seen a lot of pins |
I’ve been reading an interesting book, The Evolution of Useful Things, that
describes how many every-day items developed. For instance, T-pins, ubiquitous
in frum households for holding sheitels to (creepy) Styrofoam heads (do those
heads really need to have faces?) were invented to replace typical
straight-pins for holding papers together in an era before the paper clip
became popular. A nineteenth century catalog
advertised T-pins, “used primarily in brokerage houses for securities,” as
having “handles which speed pick-up, insertion, and withdrawal, will not slip
through the paper.”
What prompted this post was the book's description of the evolution
of the table knife. My parents were hardly sticklers for table manners, yet as
a kid I was told half-jokingly not to put my knife in my mouth because it is
bad manners, and more seriously not to because I might hurt myself. So I was surprised
to learn that this bit of advice is fairly recent.
I knew that in the distant past, forks had been rare or
non-existent, and people ate with their belt knives, an all-purpose tool that
might be used in the morning for whittling a stick, in the afternoon for
skinning game, and in the evening for cutting up dinner, spearing the pieces,
and placing them in the mouth. What I had not known is that even when forks
became common at the dinner table, knives were still used to convey food to the
mouth.
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| 17th century table setting |
As forks became more popular, table knives lost their sharp
point, whose function of spearing pieces of food was replaced by the fork’s
tines. Early forks, though, had their own shortcomings. They often had two or
three straight, narrow tines and were poor tools for picking up loose foods –
the example most often given is peas. To compensate, flatware makers broadened
the now-blunt tip of the table knife so that it could be used to pile the peas
upon, and curved it so that only a small motion of the wrist was required to bring the end
of the knife to the mouth.
Clearly, then, the admonition to not put my knife in my mouth was not based
on anything “real.” In the recent past, as little as a couple of hundred years
ago, knives had actually been designed to make putting them into the mouth easier. Nor does the worry about cutting
oneself really carry any weight. Table knives today are not really sharp at
all, and rely on a serrated edge to saw through food. When knives were the only
utensil, and routinely put into the mouth, they were sharp enough to be used as
a woodworking tool. Yet history doesn’t record generations of people constantly
bleeding from cuts in their mouths.
The real reason we are not supposed to put knives in our
mouths is that when the modern version of the fork finally developed in the
early nineteenth century, with four closely-spaced tines bent in a scoop shape
that could easily handle all sorts of foods, only “old-fashioned” people
continued to use their knives to pick up food. Those who were more “with it”
relegated the knife to its current function of cutting food into pieces to be picked up by the fork.
Fast forward two hundred years to today, and the change in
tableware fashions has been forgotten by society at large. All that remains is
a prejudice against those who use their knives to carry food to their mouths, justified
by appeals to etiquette and safety.
As Emily Post, the famous early 20th century writer on and arbiter of etiquette
once wrote, “etiquette is nothing more than tradition.” The story of the table
knife’s development makes me wonder, how many things do we do in the name of “tradition,” that really recent changes to social custom, bolstered by post-hoc reasons that, upon examination, are flatly contradicted by reality?
[A lot. Everything from the invention Halitosis (patholigizing
bad breath) by Listerine to putting a hechsher on bleach.]
