More random fiction complaints!

[conuly]

Sooooo if you are confronted with more silverware at the table than you're accustomed to using, the rule is outside in. You start on the edges and work your way inwards, and unless your dining companion simply enjoys fucking with you they will tell you that rather than muttering "That's the wrong spoon" every time you try to eat your soup. The only people who actually have to remember which spoon is which are the ones setting the table, which brings us to point two:

Nobody's going to set the table with more utensils than they actually plan on using. Nobody. If it's a three course meal, that's three courses worth of utensils, not twenty. There is such a thing as being just too much, and at a certain point everybody's laughing at their faux pas instead of yours. (Then again, if your so called friends have spent the meal telling you you're using the wrong fork without telling you how to find the right fork, maybe they're just rude assholes.)

You can add this to the list of hills on which I'll die.

Comments

[darkoshi]

I'm the kind of person who takes whichever utensil looks most pleasing to me and uses it, not giving a thought nor caring about which one is *supposed* to be used.

[conuly]

Well. The thing is, an array of utensils isn't just about showing off "Wow, I've sure got a lot of silverware!"

Form follows function. At least in theory, the slightly different shapes of the slightly different forks and spoons has to do with the different jobs they do, and the right utensil does the job a little more efficiently and better than the wrong one.

Eating your dinner with a salad fork instead of a dinner fork isn't as obviously error-tastic as eating with a fork when you ought to be using a spoon, of course.

And if you do have an array of utensils set in front of you, switching utensils between courses means your utensils are fresh and clean at the start of each course, so you're not tasting salad dressing as you eat your fish.