I recently picked up the book Talk To The Hand by one of my favorite authors, Lynne Truss. This particular book is about etiquette and how the world today is so incredibly rude and, in term, disregards common manners and greetings.

Just to give you a small taste of the sense of the humor Truss puts into the book, I’ll quote her Author’s Note at the start of the book. “The author apologises for the high incidence of the word “Eff” in this book. It is, sadly, unavoidable in a discussion of rudeness in modern life. Variants such as Effing, mother-Effing, and what the Eff? positively litter the text. If you don’t Effing like it, you know what you can Effing do. (That’s a joke.)”

I’m only a few pages in, but it’s definitely worth the read for people who are sticklers, like myself.

This brings me to my encounter with a mother and her son earlier today when I was bringing my father to an eye appointment. The tone, phrases, and other gestures the son was using towards his mother were completely unacceptable. He looked like he was nineteen or twenty years old, but acted like he was three. His mother seemed so incredibly nice, and yet he treated her like crap. I was on the verge of punching him in the face (If there were less people in the room, I might have).

Moral of the story? Be grateful of your parents kids; they do so much for you.

And go buy Talk To The Hand.