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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

One factor that will return once people start to panic is table manners, many of which seem fussy (separate saving utensils, a butter knife, not putting used utensils onto the table) but actually evolved for hygiene reasons.

Sadly of course like any complex behavior it was also hijacked for sumptuary purposes (grape shears, egg spoons, not finishing your plate in some cultures) but I hold out a hope (probably in vail) that those kinds of rules won't be revived.

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> One factor that will return once people start to panic is table manners, many of which seem fussy (separate serving utensils, a butter knife, not putting used utensils onto the table) but actually evolved for hygiene reasons.

When I was a kid growing up in the late 1950s, I thought we had this problem solved.

All the local restaurants kept a jar of mustard and a jar of mayonnaise on each table. (Yes, mayo sitting out all day, but let's ignore that for now.)

They didn't have separate utensils for these jars, you just used the table knife from your place setting. This led to a problem.

What if you had already cut your burger in half and then decided you want more mayo or mustard? You certainly wouldn't use a dirty table knife that would get bits of lettuce and tomato and bread and beef into the condiments.

Fortunately, my mom taught us basic sanitation: before you dip your table knife into the mustard or mayo jar, you must first lick it clean!

Missed opportunity to say that you "thought we had this problem licked" ;)

I didn't expect that ending...

Having silverware actually made out of silver existed for sanitary reasons as well. Same reason to throw a silver dollar in your well.

Unfortunately, it's also a cause of metal poisoning. "Blue blood" was a term for upper class families with silverware who had silver poisoning because of it.

My recollection: we don't know how to treat silver poisoning.

AFAICT silver itself is not poisonous in any useful way - your skin might turn blue, and you'll metabolize certain compounds worse, but it won't kill you, or even slow you down much.

Now, if it was silver and arsenic, or some other toxic compound, that'd be a very bad time, but elemental silver shouldn't be any worse than mildly annoying.

its my understanding that "Blue blood" comes from the fact that most of them were pale and you can really see their blue veins, not that they were all poisoned by their silverware.

its my understanding that silverware is very safe, and getting silver poisoning from eating off it is extremely unlikely. they'd have to be eating their silverware to notice any difference

The term “blue blood” came to be associated with the aristocracy simply because it was not uncommon in earlier times for European nobility to have skin that appeared to have a blue cast. The bluish (or sometimes greenish) discoloration of their skin was often caused by a condition known as Argyria.

Argyria it the result of ingested silver particles that are not able to pass through the body. Historically, this was caused by particles from silver eating utensils being swallowed along with food or silver being taken for medicinal purposes. Aristocrats were originally the ones who could afford medicine and who enjoyed the daily privilege of eating off of silver plates, drinking from silver vessels, and, as the saying goes, being born with “a silver spoon in their mouth.” Thus, Argyria was a condition that was more common among the upper class.

http://www.sensationalcolor.com/color-meaning/color-words-ph...

If this is true, why doesn't it show up in paintings? Your source is written by a "color expert", not a historian, and she cites no evidence. The veins showing through pale skin theory sounds more likely to me.

Paintings were very expensive, upper class commodities. They frequently idealized their subjects.

One British king had portraits delivered to him of a potential mate and was disappointed when she showed up and wasn't as attractive as her portrait. One source mocked him for it, saying he should have realized it was probably idealized, after all, it was his own portrait artist he sent, a guy who had been making him look good for years.

Colloidal silver still sometimes causes blue skin:

https://supplementpolice.com/colloidal-silver/

The one person I know who probably has argyria has dark-grey skin with a very slightly bluish tint.

"While silver is potentially toxic to humans at high doses, the risk of serious harm from low doses, given over a short term, is slight". If something does no identifiable harm, and is a sign of high social class, wouldn't "idealizing" mean exaggerating argyria, not hiding it?

Everyone here, including you, is dismissing the idea that it's actually harmful. Maybe the people who made those paintings didn't see it that way.

"Born with a silver spoon in their mouth" is not usually a nice thing to say. It usually means they are basically overprivileged assholes.

In chelation groups, metal poisoning is generally viewed as having a negative impact on the personality. Perhaps people who routinely dealt with "blue bloods" had enough first-hand experience to notice that visible signs of silver poisoning correlated to asshole behavior.

Anyway, I don't actually think the questions being put to me are in good faith from people sincerely curious about my knowledge or my opinions. I think the pattern of downvotes and questions suggests everyone here thinks I'm a clueless idiot and they are trying to politely let me know how stupid I am because civility is demanded by the rules of the forum.

So continuing to try to answer questions in good faith is likely making me look stubborn, pigheaded, difficult and so much of a nutjob that there is no hope of reaching me.

It's not a dance I care to engage in further.

Adieu.

>"Born with a silver spoon in their mouth" is not usually a nice thing to say. It usually means they are basically overprivileged assholes.

The concept of "overpriviledge" is modern.

It derives from middle ages Spanish racism. Visible veins to show their fine white skinned blood wasn't contaminated by the dark skinned Moors.

The Moors occupied territory in parts of what is now Spain and Portugal for nearly a thousand years.

Silver is antimicrobial even at concentrations too low to be dangerous to humans. The same is true of copper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect

Yes, both silver and copper are antimicrobial. As far as I know, silver has zero nutritional value. Copper is a micronutrient useful to humans.

If you want antimicrobial metal kitchenware, copper makes more sense than silver, though it should still not be overused.

Additionally, copper surfaces in hospitals have a proven track record of helping to kill infection and reduce the transmission of hospital acquired infections.

If you can afford it (as it isn't cheap) and want to Prep for a post antibiotic world, copper fixtures of various sorts in your home would not be a bad idea.

https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/125654/p...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4561453/

BTW the conductivity of silver should make for an excellent frying pan. I saw one at Tiffanys but could not afford to find out.

In Lionel Shriver’s wonderful ‘The Mandibles’ [0], set in the near-future, human contact has become a no-no for this reason. To touch is to spread germs, which are by now potentially deadly.

Great book if you’re in to near-future dystopia.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandibles

Will check it out! Sort of related in the no human contact sense is Asimov's The Naked Sun and (of course) E.M.Forster's The Machine Stops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

You complain about implements that could spread germs about, but also complain about grape shears that prevent everyone digging into the shared grapes with their bare hands.

What actually is the risk of inter person bacterial infection like this? Is there not more risk of getting ecoli from the shared salad, than the shared salad spoon?

I mean a regular set of shears works fine. A fish knife’s shape is handy for certain flakey fish (but not all fist, e.g. tuna, swordfish). Butter knife’s slight spatula shape is handy for butter transport but mainly serves to remind you “this isn’t yours” which always makes me laugh when I M issued one in the US.

I would settle for people not coughing an sneezing into their hands and then immediately touching everything in their vicinity. I see everyone around me doing this and it disgusts me.

(For the record, a better way to handle it is to sneeze into the inside of your elbow or immediately wash your hands after.)

It could be worse. Where I work, a few weeks ago I saw somebody lick his fingers and then reach into the container of forks and feel around for a while, apparently to find just the right fork.

I was guessing he had dry skin and had trouble picking up a fork unless he moistened his fingers first?

In any case I quietly went to a different container to get my own fork.

I wouldn't go quietly but that's just me, fighting the windmills :).

> many of which seem fussy (separate saving utensils, a butter knife, not putting used utensils onto the table)

Fussy? Aren’t these just common sense? I wouldn’t consider them to even be “table manners”.

Looks like your comment is being downvoted due to lack of clarity in my note. My apologies!

Well yes, I agree they are sensible but it seems in the USA they are not only typically unknown but seen as pretentious.

E.g. rather than have a butter knife for transferring butter to your plate and then using a regular or smaller but regular style knife for spreading it on your bread, each person (in a typical semi-fancy US restaurant) is issued a butter knife which is used both to retrieve butter and to spread it on your (potentially bitten) bread.

And they are learned matters.

Butter knives are used to prevent crumbs transfering to the butter dish, which can go mouldy. They've got nothing to do with germs in the mouth.

> Looks like your comment is being downvoted due to lack of clarity in my note. My apologies!

I have more than enough karma to take a hit once in a while. No need to apologize :)

> it seems in the USA they are not only typically unknown but seen as pretentious

I live in the US, so I'm finding it surprising that you think these are not the norm. Perhaps I'm self-selecting the people I'm around, or don't pay attention to the people who do these things…

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