Manners provide a veneer of caring and interest in others over the selfishness that naturally exists in people. (This definition is more negative than I intended, but it works.) It is a social expectation that acquaintances will exchange greetings and well-wishes upon meeting. I am interested in the question of when these interactions are judged to be an example of hypocrisy rather than politeness.

Let's consider two neighbors, Bob and Joe. They do not like each other. When they see each other on the street or in a store, they will greet each other with a ‘good morning’ and a ‘how are you doing?’. Neither of them actually cares how the other person is doing or truly wishes him well. They do this because it is a social norm.

Now let's take up the case of two co-workers, Greg and Tony. They despise each other though they try to hide that from the rest of the people at their office. Greg is actively working to get Tony fired and Tony knows this. Yet when they meet in the break room or at a work social function, they exchange pleasantries accompanied by smiles.

When does public politeness become hypocrisy or does it?

I've had two recent run-ins with the new docx files being produced by Word 2007. In both cases, an unsuspecting user created a document and emailed it out thinking that as Word document everyone should be able to read it. Of course, no one was.

At the core of docx is Microsoft's new "open standard" Office Open XML. Being XML, I was able to just strip out the text in the first case. With the second document, those involved wanted the formatting preserved. I poked around a bit and discovered that Microsoft had released a patch for older versions of Word. I installed it and opened the file but all the formatting disappeared. I then tried one of those online conversion pages and received a much better result. Microsoft can't even implement their own standard. That's really not that surprising given the size and complexity of the specification. It seems like they don't want anyone else to implement it either which defeats the whole purpose of an open standard. There's a good write-up of some of the problems with the standard here. Oh, and it also may become an ISO standard soon.

“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.”