US Edition Less than two months to go until Christmas and already the stocking-fillers are massing on the horizon, their quirky little faces beaming. Talk to the Hand, Lynne Truss's follow-up to her immensely successful Eats, Shoots and Leaves, certainly looks and feels like a stocking-filler. However, this study of rudeness in modern life is far better than that, being highly perceptive, passionately argued and extremely funny.
Her main point is that we live in "an age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence". Manners are vanishing down the plughole with disastrously wide-reaching consequences.
But why do manners matter? They matter, Truss insists, because they are about imagination; about putting oneself in another person's shoes. Manners help to make society cohere. And what's more, they are a very useful device for keeping other people at arm's length.
Now, though, it's all too easy to keep other people at arm's length without having to resort to politeness. Insulated by our iPods, bawling unselfconsciously into our mobile phones, we live increasingly in our own little bubbles into which thoughts of other people need never intrude.
One of the results of this withdrawal into solipsism is that no one seems to feel the need to apologise for anything. Truss cites the case of Janet Street-Porter who, while filming a documentary about education, tried to drum the importance of apologising into a class of children. "In every family home," she told them, "there's a word which people find it really hard to say to each other. It ends in 'y'. Can anyone tell me what it is?" A long and agonised pause followed, broken only by one boy shouting out - quite seriously - "Is it buggery?"
But what's the point of apologising? To do so simply means that you are accepting complete blame for something, and therefore tacitly inviting someone else to sue the pants off you. Far from embracing personal responsibility, we are running away from it as hard as we possibly can.
Always, there's someone - or something - else to blame. Instead of admitting that they drank too much and became violent, people are much more likely to say, "The beer went mad" - as if they were somehow powerless to prevent its advances.
Just as these are dark days for personal responsibility, so formal politeness has also taken a battering. Truss reckons, not altogether flippantly, that our main experience of formal politeness now comes from the recorded voices on automated switchboards which go into tortured locutions of bogus civility as we froth and moan on the other end of the line.
As courtesy sinks below the surface, so abuse has come surging to the fore - thereby giving rise to what Truss calls "The Universal Eff-Off Reflex". Here again, social insulation plays a big part: we are no longer as prone to self-examination as we once were, and are therefore far less inclined to feelings of shame. As a result, we live in a world of "hair-trigger sensitivity" where - as Martin Amis once wrote - the first straw is also the last one.
On television, rudeness is now venerated above all else: "abuse is the currency of all reality shows. People being vulgar and rude to one another in contrived stressful situations is TV's bread and butter." Yet, as Truss points out with equal elegance and concision, there is a paradox here: "The less we engage with one another as a society, the more we are self-righteously outraged on 'society's' behalf." Here, surely, is a brilliantly nailed truth about contemporary life.
What stops this book from being just a thunderous moan about people being horrid to one another is Truss's ambivalence towards rudeness. Broadly speaking, of course, she's against it, but she's also as amused by vintage displays of bad manners as she is appalled by their careless manifestations.
At the start of the book she quotes Paul Gascoigne, who, when asked after a football international if he had a message for the people of Norway, replied, "F--- off Norway." No doubt a result of my own helplessly puerile nature, this strikes me as being an extremely funny reply, combining pithyness, unexpectedness and complete disregard for convention in roughly equal measure - and I have a suspicion that Truss feels the same way.
Towards the end, she makes a heartfelt and desperate plea for more kindness and consideration, although without much hope of this ever happening. Yet, as I discovered recently on a late-night bus, the flame of etiquette has not been snuffed out completely. On the seat in front of me was a young couple. The man was trying to thrust his hand under the woman's skirt. After he had made several, unsuccessful attempts, the woman slapped him on the wrist and said sharply, "Oi cocker! Titties first."