Anyone who spends time with arbiters of etiquette learns quickly that behavior experts are not easily topped. Washington Correspondent Carolyn Lesh, one member of the TIME team that reported this week's cover story on the revival of interest in proper behavior, accompanied Judith Martin on a promotion tour for her new book, Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children. "She has excruciatingly correct manners," says Lesh, "but once, when we were in a store and a clerk mumbled, Martin responded with a 'What?' Later I asked 'Shouldn't you have said, Pardon me?' " No way, said Martin. "What" was correct. "To pardon" is to excuse an offense.

Lesh discovered that Miss Manners' fabled aplomb is bolstered by a ready wit. "Lost in a taxi in a seedy Chicago neighborhood on a Sunday night," Lesh recounts, "we were startled when an egg suddenly splattered on the windshield. Said Martin: 'It couldn't have been for me. I ordered bacon.' "

En route to an interview with Letitia Baldrige, etiquette author and cover subject of TIME's last major look at manners in 1978, New York Correspondent Adam Zagorin was delayed by a traffic jam. "I ran to a pay phone to explain. Baldrige replied, 'I understand perfectly. I'll use the extra time to gather more material.' With perfect politeness, she had accepted my apology and put me at my ease." Reporter-Researcher Val Castronovo interviewed several observers of modern manners, including New Yorker Cartoonist William Hamilton and Social Critic Fran Lebowitz. She found them grappling with entirely new areas, such as smoking, computer and answering-machine etiquette. Says Castronovo: "It can be argued that the new manners include both lighting your companion's cigarette and snuffing it out in a rage."

Los Angeles Correspondent Dan Goodgame, who recently arrived in California from Europe and the Middle East, has occasionally tripped over the West Coast's distinctive social conventions. "One of the first dinner invitations I received," he reports, "was billed as informal. In London, that would have meant sports coat and tie. I discovered in Hollywood it meant no coat, tie or shoes."

Senior Writer Otto Friedrich, who wrote the cover story, concedes that he has "very bad manners, almost no manners at all. But part of the problem is that nobody can agree on what good manners are. Some women are really offended if you offer them seats or hold their coats." The modern dilemma, according to Friedrich: "If you hold the door for someone, are you being polite, or are you demonstrating that you have better manners than they do, which isn't politeness at all?"