Jam people into cramped quarters, frighten them, confiscate their belongings, deprive them of decent nourishment, limit their ability to tend to their bodily needs, and keep them in suspense about their immediate fate - how can you possibly expect them to be polite?
This is the airline passengers' defense.It is used to explain the deterioration of passenger etiquette. The people who dressed up for the trip, introduced themselves to others in their row and ate as if at miniature tables in a good restaurant have devolved into the snarling, violence-prone, half-dressed masses of today.
Once, airborne etiquette problems were about overtalkative seatmates or territorial disputes about armrests. Now they are about fellow passengers going wild.
On a good flight, passengers only push down the aisles banging heads right and left with their luggage, steal the storage space allotted to those boarding behind them, recline into the laps of those in back of them, block the view of anyone trying to watch the film, knock more heads and delay food service by attempting to go up and down aisles blocked by carts, and don't even make a stab at anything resembling table manners.
On a bad flight, nobody agrees about who did what to whom and it has to be sorted out later by the justice system. Incidents involving verbal and physical abuse - always ready to explode once the etiquette barriers are down - have soared in the last few years, the industry reports.
Miss Manners acknowledges that this decline in behavior moved in the same direction and at about the same pace as the decline in airline space and services.
She can understand the need to dress for comfort when one is going to be smushed into a tiny space, and agrees that it is hard to summon a sense of occasion for a process that requires suspending the decent standards of ordinary life.
She sympathizes with those who would be willing to check their bulky luggage, but have become disoriented from long sessions watching baggage carousels go around and around, and bitter about temporary or permanent losses.
She admits that being thrown a plastic bag of items from no identifiable food group does not inspire fastidious eating, and that it is not unreasonable to need to go to the bathroom occasionally, even though it inconveniences others who are trying to see the screen, sprawling out asleep, or awaiting their pitiful refreshments.
But to understand the causes of surliness - at least for the hard-hearted Miss Manners - is not to condone it. Abandoning etiquette just makes conditions worse for passengers.
It is they who are offended by exposed sweaty flesh, the disgusting handling of food and the unfair allocation of storage. When they turn on one another because an innocently intended move - using the reclining button on the seat, or needing to get up - inconveniences them, they further lower the atmosphere quality, as it were.
Miss Manners is all for civilized travel - by which she means one of the great ocean liners of the past, provided one goes first-class and if the trip could be done rapidly when necessary, and without sinking.
In the meantime, she suggests that airline passengers remind themselves that they have subjected themselves to these conditions voluntarily; that people who have been involuntarily subjected to far worse situations often rise to heroic behavior, and that eventually they may arrive someplace better.
Dear Miss Manners: My niece will soon be marrying a very nice young man, but he has only one name. She has the usual three-part name.
What is the proper form to address the married couple in a case like this?
Gentle Reader: Are you quite sure he has no surname? Miss Manners has discovered that a great many young people who are incapable of producing their surnames (from years of going around saying, "Hi! I'm Sam!") actually have them.
But if this gentleman is bereft of one, you have no choice but to address them as "Ms. Arabella Brooke Worthington and Sam," as if you were writing to a lady and her pet.
Judith Martin is the author of "Miss Manners on Painfully Proper Weddings" (Crown).