A Faux Pas, Any Way You Cut It

Dear Miss Manners:

When I eat steak, I like to cut my steak into smaller pieces. Then, after doing so, I stab the cut portion of steak with my knife and place it in my mouth. I was recently chastised by my new girlfriend for doing so.

I have eaten my steak like this since I was a young boy. I felt my girlfriend was wrong, since I've never been corrected for eating my steak this way.

Will you please help me explain to my girlfriend that there is no wrong way to eat a Texas steak?

Sure there is. Chomping off the cow, for example.

Are you, perchance, under the delusion that manners are only for use on formal occasions, by the sissies who go to such things, and that it is manly to be slipshod?

(And yes, Miss Manners threw in the "perchance" to goad you, just as you are persisting in your eating habit to goad your girlfriend.)

Or perhaps you are just extremely old-fashioned. Eating from the point of a knife was commonplace until it was roundly condemned about 200 years ago, when the fork came into widespread use. And cutting up all the meat before it is eaten is done only for small children not yet trusted to wield knives.

That you were not told this before is a shame. But now you know.

Dear Miss Manners: