Grumpy and prickly: or are appearances deceiving ? It started with a tweet I read by an exasperated person who was in proximity with someone chatting on a cell phone. The crux of the comment was that nobody has any boundaries these days and that everyone has simply gotten so horribly rude. So...is it rude? Has rudeness truly increased? I've thought a lot about this lately. It occurred to me that perhaps we aren't ruder as a people -- perhaps we simply have a lot of evolution rapidly entering our society, and our mores haven't had a chance to catch up. More importantly, perhaps we have more overlapping cultural mores than ever. In other words, there are so very many people living in close proximity, crossing paths daily, and the truth is, we're so mobile now -- but of course, everywhere we go, we take ourselves (and our personal and cultural mores). That means that all these people we're bumping up against are not likely to be from our village, raised with our same r...