Mildness and suavity of manners; courtesy; civility; good breeding. Wellbred people are characterized by comity of manners.
If I drink wine in public company (I avoid it since red wine stains my teeth and I don’t like much white wine) I entertain the others by explaining a tip I thought I learned from Emily Post. In her book "Etiquette" (or whatever book it might really have been) Ms. Post explains that after taking a sip from a glass of wine one should wipe clean the spot at which their lips touched the glass. This little gesture helps prevent an unsightly trickle of spit and wine from running down the side of the glass. It also prevents lipstick stains and other oils from gathering at the top of the glass, a coagulation which could become exaggerated by lighting and other conditions.
I don’t know if there is a name for it but that detritus of liquid wear-and-tear is unsightly once you become aware of it. Sometimes the trickle forms a map of Italy or the Aleutian Islands, not through any associations between those places and spittle but because the wine glass’ shape is a canvas on which the spit often flows to form patterns resembling those places.
If I was an etiquette fanatic (I am anything but) I might ridicule those who fail to clean the top of their wine glass. I might point out the shape that their spitty wine had formed. "Look!" I would say. "It’s the Upper Peninsula of Michigan!" Pointing at another glass I would follow with my fingers the patterns left by the trail of spittle and wine and announce "It’s Indonesia!"
