This makes total sense to me. There is no monolithic “culture”— there are multiple related cultures, differing little in essence but differing greatly in the details. And each individual is usually only partially ignorant anyway.

Culture changes, too, and asymmetrically. So the “done thing” may be done be very few anymore.

Add an s and it gets a little better.

What do you think "reading" means?

1. Upper class stopped being formal because formality stopped being a signal of upper class.

2. Middle class stopped having social gatherings in general.

So, like, "it is a part of the culture" in the same sense as traditional outfits are a part of the culture - most people have very vague awareness, nobody really cares.

This is unnecessarily flippant, trivializing, and reductive.

The upper classes had the time and position to refine manners. I think one mistake people make is to think manners are arbitrary nonsense. But manners, when fitting, honor the self and others with conduct that suits the dignity of the human person and functions as a sign of that dignity. You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.

I’m not one for stiff artifice especially when slavishly applied, but I don’t think manners as such are arbitrary. That nobody cares would explain why so many people look like slobs and behave like boors.

If we begin with human nature and then view the virtues as perfections that actualize the fullness of that nature, then it becomes clearer that some behavior is more fitting and honored better by certain practices.

This phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because what one considers basic etiquette another considers a theatre. The end result is often that people gather in order to perform the spectacle of manners rather than use manners to facilitate a social gathering.

The upper classes in the UK regularly practice tone policing, where legitimate dissent is waved away as uncouth, even though what they say and do is far worse in private, and sometimes in public.

If you're looking for human dignity, I don't think this is its natural home.

Cramming is the only real problem there because it implies not experiencing the food. Seating position does not actually affect dignity or honor, and "gaping at a tv" can be worse or better than the alternative depending on the purpose and mood of the gathering.

And the rules applied to utensils in particular are a waste of thought.

Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan, but since the language is difficult to learn and frankly speaking nobody cares about Poland, barely anyone even knows this.

Also lots of corporations prefer "american style" approach of just refering by name (even to the CEO), so this dissapears.

Probably could write few pages about this, but nobody would care to read.

Supposedly in Finish language you retained this difference and it can be heard in some words e.g. "raha" ("money" in Finish?).

Personally I never "heard" it - sounded as a regular "h" sound for me.

> I'm interested in learning more about this!

It's very simple, actually.

For strangers, you use the third person and the title « Pan » or « Pani » (Sir or Lady). You avoid pronouns, « The Lady has forgotten the Lady's purse on the table ».

For friends, you use the t-form ("ty", thou), and use a diminutive rather than the full name. « Johny, you've forgotten your bag on the table ».

For work colleagues, you traditionally use « Pan » or « Pani » with the full form of the first name. « Mister John, the mister's bag is on the table ». This is perceived as old-fashioned, and is increasingly being replaced by the t-form.

The v-form has fallen into disuse, as it was promoted by the Communist regime.

(The old-fashioned honorifics still exist, but they are only used in administrative correspondence: the only time when you're "the respectable gentleman" is when you need to pay taxes.)

You left out most of the interesting things.

For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing. Someone from Finland can actually understand this topic, since Finnish has multiple cases - more than in Polish language (meanwhile English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two).

This isn't a correct way to describe English grammar. You can either say it has no cases or four cases with no inflections (because it definitely has subjects, objects, indirect objects, and possessives).

Presumably your native language doesn't inflect in the nominative or something like that and your English teacher once gave you your statement as a convenience fact, but the vast majority of native English speakers have never heard of grammatical case (ones who have, have typically studied inflected foreign languages). In Linguistics, it might be used to describe English and other uninflected languages (it depends).

+ Who/ Whose

Are two examples of something that could be considered possesive case. Although those are more words that describe possession than the possesive case.

Still good example of words changing.

The grammar is changing in many ways (for example, the inanimate masculine is being replaced with the animated, kroić kotleta), but this was about honorifics.

On a side note, I find interesting is that Czech language still naturally uses that plural form we abandon due to popularity of pan/pani forms.