The Faux Pas Survival Guide

A hilarious guide to recovering from greeting goofs, office offenses, dinner-table disasters, and other forms of social suicide.

It can happen anywhere — at a cocktail party, in the Laundromat, at a business meeting, on an elevator: that most unpleasant of all human errors: the faux pas. Even the most confident conversationalist has experienced the embarrassment of getting someone’s name wrong, mistaking someone’s sister for her mother, making an off-color joke in a decidedly “on-color” setting, asking about a plump person’s upcoming “blessed event” when the person is not pregnant, or committing one of dozens of other foot-in-mouth fumbles.

Jeanne Martinet comes to our rescue with her proven techniques and courageously tested advice on how to avoid and recover from every faux pas there is. You’ll learn to:

• Effectively confess, apologize, excuse, divert attention, and otherwise make things right again, no matter how serious a flub you’ve made
• Train yourself to avoid the most common gaffes
• Harness the healing power of humor
• Recover from a joke that flops (or offends)
• Handle spills, trips, and bumps with finesse
• Get over your “faux pas phobia”
• Master swift exits, subtle fade-outs
• Help others by becoming a faux pas-cifist