In old-school California, dinner came with unspoken rules, polite habits, and family routines that would totally surprise ...

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am a single man who inherited, from my parents and grandparents, both a love of entertaining and also a great deal of the trappings needed — china, crystal, linen, silver — that ...

My question is how to react when people do not respond to an invitation, nor to a gentle nudge and arrive anyway.

I hold formal dinner parties with limited place settings. But there are friends who never respond to my invitations and show up anyway. What’s the best way to accommodate them?

These are friends of mine, and I do want to entertain them, but I’m afraid I’ll be limiting them to barbecues in the future.

Miss Manners hopes, however, that you will not otherwise dumb down your charming, seated dinner parties because of a few outlaws. We, the purveyors of fish knives and strawberry forks, are a dying ...

In today's Miss Manners column, advice columnist Judith Martin responds to how hosts once tactfully communicated event end ...