Miss Manners: Addressing mail

[cereta]

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Almost all of the examples I now see on how to address invitations are totally different from what I was taught in school many years ago. Have the rules changed, or are young people these days making up their own etiquette rules?

I was taught that for a married couple, the correct address would be " Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Jones" and "Mr. and Mrs. Patrick White," not "Mr. Ben and Mrs. Elizabeth Jones" and "Mr. Patrick and Mrs. Taylor White." I was also taught that the male's name came first on the envelope.

Please set the record straight before too many young brides commit a faux pas and look uneducated.

GENTLE READER: Yes, some rules have legitimately changed, and yes, unauthorized people who make up their own rules are often unintentionally offensive. But come to think of it, the old standard that you cite also sends some people into a tizzy.

Miss Manners wishes everyone would just calm down.

There are couples who use the Mr. and Mrs. form you learned (the only one in which the gentleman's title comes first) and they should be so addressed. But there are others who prefer to be addressed more as individuals for various reasons, some of which are eminently sensible, although society used not to recognize them.

All that takes now is one extra line on the envelope:

Dr. Angelina Breakfront

Mr. Rock Moonley

or:

Mr. Oliver Trenchant

Mr. Liam Lotherington

or:

Ms. Norina Hartfort

Mr. Rufus Hartfort

Is that too much effort to ask?

Comments

[fox]

We were taught a lot of things in school years ago that are no longer applicable today. Plate tectonics, for example, was an amusing little idea until way more recently than you'd think. We keep learning and progressing in so many areas - why shouldn't etiquette be one of them?

In other words, PREACH ON, Miss Manners and Her Children.

[ellen_fremedon]

Right? I was taught in school to put two spaces after a period.

[elialshadowpine]

There's an actual reason for that! It wasn't just something done as a flourish or such. It was because the typeface used in typewriters (Courier) was such that it was extremely difficult to distinguish the end of a sentence. You needed two spaces for it to be obvious.

This continued to be the case up until the mid-00s, until the very last hangers-on (the publishing industry, mostly) ditched the idea that Courier/Courier New were the ONLY ACCEPTABLE TYPEFACES. You don't need two spaces to tell that it's the end of a damn sentence in Times New Roman.