Lesson 1: Don't talk about sex, politics,
or religion.

Source: Very, very old stuff, I got from
Mom. I wish I'd always followed it.

Lesson 2: Don't tell them ANYTHING!

Source: From an astoundingly, intensely
socially cautious person, my mother in
law. Some of the most intense brain
activity I ever saw was by her anywhere in
public. So, e.g., the woman I married
found E. Goffman, The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life easy reading and
obvious! In part the mother's intensity
came from some delicate, highly stressful
circumstances of her mother in the Great
Depression where in their small community
just a single wrong word could wipe out
the finances of the family, literally.

Lesson 3: "... keep to two subjects: the
weather and everybody's health."

Source: My Fair Lady, advice to
Professor Higgins who was socially crude!

Lesson 4: He who always calls a spade a
spade is fit only to use one.

Source: Common from some parts of the
English upper class.

I was very slow to follow this advice.
So, I had to learn the hard way, pay "full
tuition", from experience -- "Experience
is the great teacher, and some will learn
from no other."

So, Professor Higgins had to learn these
lessons the hard way. Much of the theme
of the movie Patton was that Patton
also had to learn the hard way.

IMHO, basically the advice is good. I've
been astounded at how eager some people,
how many people, are eager to attack
strongly against any violation of those
lessons. My current working guess is, TOO
MANY people are just wildly oversensitive
to even small violations of those lessons.
So, the simple solution is, when in doubt,
which means nearly all the time, follow
the lessons.

Yes, there is a downside: As in E. Fromm,
The Art of Loving, four of the keys
to intimacy (between the ears if not
between the legs) are knowledge, caring,
respect, and responsiveness. Here, for
"knowledge" he meant, roughly from memory,
"giving knowledge of one's self to the
other."

So, the lessons above conflict with this
part of Fromm's version of intimacy. So,
if have a really good relationship with
your spouse and work at a place where some
wound up clique is running the place and
has their war paint on and are on the war
path, then express your true feelings --
blow your stack, blow off steam -- in
private, at home, with your spouse.

For more examples, apparently in WWII,
both the German army and the Japanese navy
were very intense organizations.
Victorious? No. Intense? Yes!

So, can remember the movie Tora, Tora,
Tora where in the WWII Japanese navy
apparently a subordinate needed an
explicit "you may speak freely" to say
much. And in the TV series Winds of
War apparently a German officer was
encouraged to voice whatever concerns he
had until the superior issued a direct
order at which time the subordinate would
stop the concerns and just say
"Immediately".

Once around DC I was in a part-time job
working myself and my wife through our
Ph.D. degrees. At one point the US Navy
had a request: Evaluate the survivability
of the US SSBN (missile firing submarines)
fleet under a special scenario of global
nuclear war limited to sea. They wanted
the results in two weeks. Gads. Well, I
found a continuous time, discrete state
space Markov process and delivered
something in two weeks, and apparently
they liked it.

Then a few days later, some guy I'd never
seen before was in the offices. He
wandered back to my office and started
making small talk. He did this for 1-2
hours a day, for about 2 weeks. Gee, it
was no longer small talk! He got the
conversation going to current political
topics of US national security and
defense. I answered like a well informed
voting citizen with some reasonably solid,
not very unusual, opinions. Dumb de dumb
dumb, dumb. Looking back it was a high
end security interview for some high
position, and I missed out on it. Should
have followed Mom's advice: Don't talk
about politics. Certainly don't talk
about national security politics in an
office doing classified work for the US
Navy.

Another related lesson: Limit all
communications with co-workers to
objective aspects of the work, and do not
permit more than trivial instances of
small talk. Such small talk can be the
seeds of destructive office gossip,
deliberate efforts to distract from the
work, etc. Sure, the small talk should
avoid sex, politics, and religion, but
should avoid essentially everything else,
too. So, limit small talk to, say, very
short, obvious, trivial, innocuous remarks
on the weather -- of course, NEVER mention
"global warming" or "climate change"!