The Miracle of Facebook and the invention of the Blog has given us many joys, and considerable agita. What could be more delightful than reconnecting with long-lost high school friends? (Especially since you can post an old profile picture that doesn't reveal that you have not gotten to the gym in a while.) What fun it is to have pen pals in exotic lands, without the hassle of going to the post office to buy expensive airmail stamps! True, philately has suffered a blow from which it will never recover. But what of that? You now have the satisfaction of knowing instantly, upon arising and reaching for your Smartphone, what your friend in Sweden had for breakfast, and shortly thereafter delighting him with the information that you, too, have consumed pancakes - although, as you take pains to explain, American pancakes are fluffier than their Swedish counterparts, so you didn't really have the same breakfast. You never have to wait to find out that your friend in Bora Bora has had her eighth baby, that it's another girl, and that they have named her something truly terrible because they already used up all the good names on the other seven. Well - the other six. You didn't like what they named the last one, either.
But my point is - if you are still receiving newscasts from these people, then you are still on their Friends list. And how does one remain on the Friends list, so as to go on receiving these scintillating bits of information?
That, Gentle Reader, is the subject of today's column. To stay on the Friends list, you must cultivate tact. You must become sensitive to nuance, and learn the art of inference - and, on occasion, the art of artifice. In short, you must learn to tailor the tone of your comment to the prevailing standard. Whether or not you are that apogee of over-analysis known as an English Major, it is imperative that you learn to read between the lines.
Think of Facebook as an infinite series of dinner parties, to which you have a standing invitation by virtue of your Friendship (real or virtual) with the host or hostess - i.e., the person who owns the page to which you want to append a comment. Some of these dinner parties may be formal. Others are raucous affairs, involving greasy pizza cartons, beer kegs and Jello shots. Then there are those ghastly dinners at which somebody starts talking about politics, and everybody argues vehemently for three hours without changing anybody else's mind or yielding an inch, while the croquettes adhere to the plates in gummy, congealing pools of gravy and the hostess begs, with ever-increasing plaintiveness, to know whether anyone would care to step into the living room for coffee?
And how do we know what standard our host or our hostess, the titular owner of the Facebook page hosting the discussion in which we wish to join, has set? Ah, how glad I am to hear you ask! This is where our powers of inference and observation are put into motion!
We look for clues in the language that is being used by our hostess. (I'm getting tired of saying "host or hostess. Let's just pretend it's me and go with the feminine ending.) Follow the lead of your hostess, and keep your remarks just a shade or two more moderate in tone than hers, and it is doubtful that you will go too far astray. For example:
1. Profanity. If nobody has used it yet, do not be the first to do so. It does not matter a particle that the last time you hung out till three a.m. at a club in the Meatpacking District with your hostess, you heard her turning the air blue with a string of anatomically impossible suggestions for what that cabdriver who refused to pick the two of you up, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she had lost one of her shoes should go do to himself. If in today's post your hostess has managed to express her dismay about the fact that the NYC school chancellor has referred to a raging blizzard that dumps another six inches of snow on top of all the intersections as a "beautiful day" without resorting to the ten letter word that got Lenny Bruce arrested (a word, by the by, that I once saw expressed on South Park as a picture of a rooster side-by-side with a picture of a lollipop), do not be the first to use that ten letter word, however great your admiration for the late, lamented Lenny.
2. Do Not Seize the Conversational Steering Wheel. Do you remember Mr. Dick, the gentle lunatic in David Copperfield who lived with Aunt Betsy Trotwood? No matter what the other characters were talking about, he always brought the conversation back around to King Charles' head, and the sorrowful fact that it had been cut off. Mr. Dick was well aware of his aberration, and mildly apologetic for this peculiar obsession. But he simply couldn't help himself. Gentle Reader - do not be a Mr. Dick. You may know in your heart that the source of all human ills and joys lies in living exclusively on organic, gluten-free, vegan coconut ice cream - and I, for one, would lend an attentive ear the first few times you said it; that sounds quite reasonable to me. However, when the topic is "Should children of six be permitted to retain exclusive control of the remote, and what makes you think so?" kindly do not bring the conversation abruptly around to vegan coconut ice cream, because all you'll do is give everybody whiplash. While it is true that Cato the Elder thundered "Carthago delenda est!" so many times when the topic under discussion on the floor of the Roman Senate was "Aquaducts, and What Province Shall We Tax to Pay for Them?" that the other senators finally had to have Carthage burned down just to shut him up, you can bet that if they'd had an Unamicus button, they'd have pushed it.
3. When in Doubt, Look to Your Hostess and Follow Her Lead. In her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath discloses that, while dining with the benefactress whose generosity had endowed her with a scholarship to the prestigious (and expensive) Smith College, the novelist Olive Higgins Prouty, author of a number of tearjerker novels that were made into very commercially successful Hollywood films, the most famous of which are probably Now, Voyager and Stella Dallas - Sylvia, as I say, confesses to the following faux pas in Chapter Four:
“The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.”
The point of relating the anecdote in The Bell Jar is to contrast the gauche naivete of Ms. Plath, who can never quite conceal her bitterness at having been raised in penny-pinching mode by a widowed mother who struggled to pay the bills, with the worldly pretentiousness of her hostess, Ms. Prouty, who by then had already attained everything that her young protegee thought ought to be hers by right - especially since she, Sylvia, was a better writer. How humiliating, to learn upon her return to the dorm, amid the derisive howls of the trust fund babies who also lived on her floor, that she had mistaken the liquid in which she was supposed to cleanse her fingers for soup! How mortifying to discover, by feverishly paging through the index of the etiquette book under "F," that, had Ms. Prouty been a hostess of the more gracious type - such as, for example, Queen Victoria - she would have covered up her protegee's gaffe by picking up her own finger bowl and taking a healthy slurp, thereby setting young Sylvia at ease, and possibly even preventing unfortunate later events involving a gas oven!
But let us pause, for a moment. And, while we're at it, let us suppose that Sylvia had paused for a moment, too. What, then, if Ms. Plath, confronted with the unfamiliar finger bowl, had kept her spoon on the table, her hands demurely folded in her lap, and politely spoken of this and that, all the while keeping a gimlet eye upon Olive Higgins Prouty to see what she was going to do with that after-dinner soup? Why, in that case - problem solved! Ms. Plath, by following the lead of her hostess, would have simply emitted a silvery laugh and dabbled her own dainty digits in the scented water with the pretty cherry blossoms floating in it.
Gentle Reader - before you take a swig from the finger bowl, watch your hostess and see if she's swigging, too.
"But what," you inquire, "shall I do, if, in the heat of the moment, I have lost sight of all this excellent advice for How to Win Virtual Friends and Influence Bloggers, and, in my zeal to enlighten all those people who don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about, have incautiously hit 'enter' with never a thought of the consequences?"
The etiquette books, happily, provide a remedy in this case, as well. When it is finally brought to your attention that you were the only one at the dinner party who was standing on the table, bellowing Madonna's greatest hits into a lollipop lamb chop and begging others to admire your karaoke skills, it is never incorrect to offer an elaborately worded, fulsome apology to all who attended, and a lavish bouquet to your justly offended hostess. Fortunately, there are some very nice images on the FTD site that you can send in a link.
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