We see our appearance in public among strangers differently than my grandfather's generation.

Should men take off their hat when they go indoors?

Does that even matter anymore?

Hi, I'm Scott Ott with Stephen Green and Bill Whittle.

This episode of Right Angles brought to you by the members at Bill Whittle.com.

And gentlemen, I know it seems like a trivial question, but it wasn't trivial to the person who wrote into Mish Manners, a syndicated columnist who opines on issues of etiquette.

And the writer basically said that she thought it was proper for men to take off their hat when they step indoors.

But she feels reluctant to say something about it.

She's a schoolteacher, apparently, and she feels reluctant to say something about it because

she's afraid her students will say, but why?

And then she has to explain to them.

Now, I'll be honest with you, Ms. Manners dodged the

question. She basically turned it around on the school teacher and said, why don't you give your

kids an assignment to go home and figure out a way to research this question. Is it important? Why is

it important? Is it no longer important? But Stephen Green, to me, this just

kind of raised a question that is not just about generational differences, but about societal

conventions that have endured and then not. They just stopped. And it reminds me of the countless YouTube videos that you can find

of people who were captured in the wild, so to speak, at Walmart, in all manner of dress

and undress. People who think it's okay to wear pajamas in public, for example. I work in a retail environment.

I often see people coming in wearing outfits that to me look like a darn good start on getting

dressed in the morning. It's just they didn't finish up the other 75% of what they had intended

to do. And I think we'll leave it at that.

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