The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1891-09-04
TIE PUBLIC TOOTHPICK.
a Practice Which Is Not Consistent will
Good Manners.

a Practice Which Is Not Consistent with
Good Manners.
The public toothpick is a public nui-
sance about which there has always
been more or less complaint, but there
seems just now to be new outbreak of
the opposition, and in some quarters a
pretty lively discussion of toothpick
proprieties. 1t is evident that if the
obtrusiveness of the toothpick is ever to
be reduced the subject ought to be
freely discussed. To discuss the public
toGthpick is to condemn it.
The summer is the particular season
of the public toothpicll. At this period
it is seen everywhere. 1t is not con-
fined to the cafe or the dining
room, where it can always be found
busy, but it is in its glory as well on the
porches of the summer hotels, whether
in the mountains or at the seashore and
it is unfortunately sometimes to be
found in the drawing room. But while
the public toothpick is at its best, or
rather worst, in the summer months it
can be seen at all seasons. Toothpicks
are chcap-as cheap as bad manners
and the law doesn't prevent their use in
almost any way that the free Amer
lean citizen chooses to employ them.
While some people have no use what
ever for toothpicks. and others know
how to use them privately, as they do
their tOOthbrushes, there are plenty
and the number is apparently not de-
creasing-who have no use for them
except at the table or in the presence
of others elsewhere scarcely less no.
ticeable. People who have good taste
in dress, who would not wear a frayed
collar, an ill-fitting shirt or a neglected
shoe, and who in other respects have
fairly good manners, will use tooth
pick with noise and ostentation in a
public dining room and carry it in the
mouth for an hour after eating.
These things are seen everywhere, in
town and out of town-not alone in ho-
tells, but in public conveyances and
even in the street cars after the theater
lunch at night. How many young men
have ruined their matrimonial hopes by
the public use Of a toothpick can never
be known until the girls have been cam
vassed on the subject. What is more,
the young men are likely never to know
what hurt them, for those who haven't
yet learned better than to use a tooth
pick in public can hardly be expected
to understand the penalties that go
along with such habit. They may
have learned that it won't do to fasten
napkin under the chin, but they never
learn anything about the vulgarity of
the public toothpick.
The suggestion made by a CORES
pendent that free toothpicGs should not
be supplied as they are by keepers of
public houses might, if adopted. have
something of a tendency to reduce the
publicity of the toothpick, but would
not destroy it altogether. The tooth
pick habit is SO settled with many peo-
pie that if they couldn't get toothpicks
one way they would another They
would even go to the trouble and eX-
pense of buying them in order to main
tain vulgar and ill-mannered practice
Apparently, the man who uses his
toothpick in public, who shifts it around
with his tongue and makes loud noises
with it, has nothing dearer to his heart
Nevertheless, the public toothpick is
not one of the reinements of the time,
and the man who will invent a tooth
pick which can not by any possible be
used in public will prove himself a bene-
factor of mankind. -Philadelphia Press.