This is always good fun… and it’s This Weekend 6/7/8 June
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Alas, I am alcohol free for about 558 days now! But I can TOTALLY get it…
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It’s an AMERICAN knife placement, duh!
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OK I have US relatives (my middle brother’s ex-wife and his daughters, plus the outlaws), and as a Brit I’ve never been able to follow the logic of the US food handling technique:
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Use fork in left hand and knife in right to cut up food (OK so far).
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Put down knife, transfer fork to right hand, eat a piece of food;
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transfer fork back to left hand;
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pick up knife and cut some more food;
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repeat.
What’s with that system? Is it meant to slow you down so you don’t eat too quickly and choke? 
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My American mother always struggled with UK table manners, her fork would leap into her right hand and then be surreptitiously passed back to her left.
Here in France, I’m not embarrassed to pick up the remains of a duck leg, or a piece of collier d’agneau and finish it off held in my fingers. As far as I’m concerned that’s OK because firstly, I’m an ignorant foreigner and secondly, and more importantly, it’s my piece of meat.
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When you are left handed
- ok
- put down knife, keep fork in left hand and eat.
- keep folk in left hand and repeat 1 only if food cannot be cut/diced with the fork
My knife is often returned to the cutlery drawer unused after a meal.
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LOL get a spoon with a sharpen edge. 
I’m mainly a South paw, knife left hand fork in the right, spoons probably both, but primarily left.
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So you shouldn’t be, that’s the civilised way to eat such, and licking your fingers after isn’t a non non, 
(for me coming from Anglo Saxon / Jutes ancestry).
The only thing I picked up from the photo of @DrSukie was that the knife edge is pointing out from the plate rather than in.
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Ah… but is there a choice of exactly where the knife can be placed or is there a strict Rule/Law 
(This harks back to the thread about “where to place the Crit’Air sticker” which has had us all in fits )
Perhaps a thread about knife-placements might prove just as amusing
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Tunnel booked for Thursday! I do dislike having to count days. I had a 6 month visa last year and will get one next year. Jim has an Irish passport. Helen, how did you get an Irish passport for your husband. When i looked into it i understood that there was a12 month residence required.
We replaced about 80 leylandii with a mixed hedge at Christmas so Friday morning I will be checking those and i hope admiring their new growth.
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Morning
Yes, normally you have to be continuously resident for the 12 months prior to the application. And resident for 3 out of the 5 years prior to the application.
My boss had been going on and on for years about another colleague who was married to a British lady and himself had British citizenship yet, as far as any of us knew, had never lived in the UK. My boss was convinced this bloke must have done something dodgy involving utility bills or whatever.
In the end I just went to see the colleague and asked him outright (nicely obviously). And he told me he’d used a little-known route whereby if the applicant or their British spouse was employed abroad in the public service, the residence requirement could be waived.
He also thought that the UK had since closed this route to citizenship.
So one wet Sunday afternoon I started reading the Irish Nationality Act of 1956 and, sure enough, tucked away in, I think, Section 15 of the full amended version, there was a provision similar to one this colleague had mentioned in the context of British citizenship.
I spent the next few weeks compiling a humongous dossier (based on the argument that I met the definition of “employed abroad in the public service”) and sent it off. Et voilà. Three years later and following a slightly traumatic trip to Killarney (when signing the oath my husband put the wrong date, I could have throttled him. And then going through security at Dublin airport, there was an altercation when they discovered he was carrying a keychain which could double as a lethal weapon), he’s Irish. And British. And extremely grateful to both countries.
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…I think that it was the British Colonialists who introduced the fork knife shuffle into the then colony ?
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I didn’t know that rule either. Thanks for the explanation. We’re both retired now so it wouldn’t work for us. I was in public service (teacher) but i don’t think defence industry would qualify. Glad you sorted it for your husband.
You could well be right - I did wonder if it was a mediaeval or 17th century thing that had survived in the Distant Possessions of His Majesty. 
I appreciate that left-handers do it differently. But the technique just puzzles me from a practical point of view.
When not in use of course the proper place for the knife is in the lower right hand corner of the plate, next to the Crit’air sticker. 
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…but to round plates have corners? 
… oh, perhaps you mean the matriculation plate of the car?
yes they do, although only on a microscopic level due to imperfections in the material.
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It’s insane. As a child, I was tought the Brit/Euro way. But once in school, that was drilled out of us - same way lefties used to be forced to be right-handed writers. Who knows why? My best guess is that someone way back just wanted to be ornery and change things to be different. Typical Yankee “we have to do it THIS way” thinking. Like keeping us using the imperial system. I and my wee classmates (kindergarten or 1st grade) were 100% ready for the conversion to metric in the mid-60s - that never happened.
How strange! Anyway it’s good to know there is an explanation, even if it’s just “it’s how we always did it!” 
I hear you re the metric thing - apparently metric is actually the official US measurement system (post the 1975 Metric Conversion Act) but it was made voluntary not compulsory so the US ended up with even more of a muddle than the UK has, where a few old units like miles and pints linger on, even though everything else is mostly metric.
I’ve heard some American folks decry metric as being “too complicated”, even though it’s way more logical and internally consistent than pounds, ounces, feet, furlongs, and acres etc.
And the classic example was the Mars Orbiter spacecraft that ended up in too low an orbit around Mars and crashed, all because NASA JPL in California used metric for their calculations but spacecraft contractor Lockheed Martin in Colorado used imperial units, failing to convert everything to metric as they were supposed to.
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Yes, fascinating! - starting school in the late 1960’s, we too anticipated decimilisation and quickly learnt both systems. Very useful in later life I find becuase using an imperial tape measure is so much easier doing joinery/carpentry becuase the numbers a smaller and easier to remember (for me) when transfering measurements. Great too when I forgot my spectacles. But, when I was an architect, everything was done in millimeters (ignoring cm’s and m’s) so the numbers did get a bit long on a drawing…
Good news though…I heard on the radio the other day why the volume of a standard wine bottle is 750 ml …because of the self-same British folk who introiduced the knife zig-zag to USA, once used to be the biggest frence wine swillers and ordered in UK gallons. 6 wine bottles@ 750ml (a case) is a gallon. (sorry if y’all ready knew that…)
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Yes back in the days of Good King Richard (not) the English Crown owned large chunks of SW France including Burgundy so naturally les Anglais Posh drank a lot of vino (peasants not so much).
Yet another Brexit fail to let the French have that lot back, not to mention Anjou and Maine where that nice Sauvignon Blanc comes from (thanks King John).
According to my mate Google, the standard size was chosen because it’s easy to divide a 50-gallon barrel into 300 75cl bottles.
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