"Talk to the Hand": Author vents about our collective rudeness

"Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door"
by Lynne Truss
Gotham Books, 206 pp., $20

The so-called purpose-driven life may be the new mega-religion in America, but professional prig Lynne Truss is raising up a movement of like size: Call it the Annoyance-Driven Life.

Truss is the clever, very funny Brit who brought us "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," a best-seller as much about common decency as commas. This latest work is bolder, in both title and intent. In "Talk to the Hand," she wonders what made parents abdicate control over their bratty children and why people must natter so loudly into cellphones, use filthy language in place of perfectly good noncurse words and generally embrace rudeness as an international pastime. Annoyed? The woman is positively radioactive with pique.

She is also, of course, 100 percent spot-on in her analysis of the crumbing state of civilized behavior. The worst may not even be this person yelling the f-word into his cellphone or that salesperson snapping her gum in your face. The most trying development of all may be the ridiculous number of inane decisions we face as part of the simplest transactions. Who can behave decently under this sort of pressure?

"But I really think this has gone too far, this worship of choice. I take my mum out for a cup of coffee and I say, 'What would you like?' and ... I want her to specify what size, what type, whipped cream or no whipped cream, choice of sprinkle, type of receptacle, type of milk, type of sugar — not because either of us cares about such stuff, but because I'm expecting all these questions at the counter, and you look daft if you dither."

As we all stagger along under the weight of too many choices, paradoxically we've been left with fewer things to respect, fumes Truss. "I would say that respect is now allowable in very few fields: we respect sportsmen (but only when they are playing sport) and we respect charisma, but mainly we respect anyone who's got the latest iPod." Well, she's mostly right. Some of us also respect a feisty writer who manages to make best-sellers out of misplaced commas and bad manners.