(FORTUNE Magazine) – Say what you will about Miss Manners, she is definitely not a fool.

When I invited the doyenne of etiquette to lunch at a crab shack, my secret hope was that I'd have the chance to watch her shuck crustaceans, discard mounds of unappetizing goo, and pick out bits of seafood without losing her poise. She will have none of this. On the appointed date, she arrives at the Dancing Crab, a D.C. seafood hut, slides elegantly into a booth, and announces, "I'll have the crabcakes, please."

Miss Manners has more important things to do than crack crabs. She's busy rescuing civilization. Or at least that's what the title of her new book, Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, would have one believe. In the 20 years since a mild-mannered Washington Post reporter named Judith Martin donned the mantle of Miss Manners and began ladling out etiquette advice, she has gratefully seen the decline of the "do what you feel" school of etiquette but watched with alarm as a whole new set of etiquette crises have arisen. The index of her book is a catalogue of them, running as it does from "abortion" to "Yeltsin, Boris" and stopping in between at such key topics as "dissin'," "flag burning," and "jail, importance of manners/etiquette in."

One arena to which Martin devotes special attention is the workplace; there are, she says, so many new and unexpected ways for co-workers to intrude upon one another, and she, for one, wishes they would stop. The problem, she says as she tucks into her crabcakes with plastic cutlery and dispatches them down her mannerly gullet, stems from "that phony 'we're one big happy family' idea." Workers, she believes, are not necessarily friends--they are a group of people who are thrown together at the whim of their employer. The failure to understand this simple fact has given rise to a host of problems, from that marathon of awkwardness known as the office Christmas party to the group therapy known as "sensitivity training" to sexual harassment. (Her prescriptions for these faux pas: If you want to reward your workers at holiday time, she says, give them a day off; if you want them to refrain from uttering epithets, don't plumb their psyches, just ask them to stop; and if you feel you must stick your tongue down their throats, please be sure that they're okay with it and that it doesn't happen on company time.)

For similar reasons, Martin also opposes the popular trend toward casual Fridays. "It's such a fraud!" she daintily exclaims. "If we all agree to dress down, does that mean we're not going to judge you by what you wear? Of course not. So you end up having to buy a third wardrobe--not the real professional clothes you wear the rest of the week, and not the funny T-shirts and sweats we wear when we're really being casual."

(I try to imagine Miss Manners in a funny T-shirt and sweats. I cannot.)

And how would Martin handle that most difficult etiquette moment, the layoff?

"You seem to be operating on the theory that manners are always to make someone feel good," she says--sternly but politely. "You can't make them feel good in this situation, but you can refrain from saying things that make them feel bad. You try to do it in a gentle fashion, in person. There are ways of putting things. You could say, 'We appreciate what you've done here,' then give a reason for the layoff. Downsizing is a wonderful reason to give, if it's true. If it's job performance, you can say, 'this is probably not your strong suit.' "

Etiquette doesn't just make an office more pleasant, Martin says, it also helps a company's bottom line--after all, if workers see no need to treat one another in a professional manner, imagine how they're treating customers. And if customers are treated rudely, she adds, they'll take their business elsewhere. She produces an axiom for the service industry that ought to be written on 3-by-5 cards and mounted above cash registers: "There are two reactions to any dissatisfaction. The first is, 'This is an outrage, I can't understand how this could happen, and I want something done about it right away.' The second is, 'There, there. Mistakes happen. It's really quite all right.' If a business says the first thing, the customer will say the second. But if a business takes role No. 2, the customer will take role No. 1. If they trivialize it, it gets more important to the customer."

Bad service is, happily, not an issue at the Dancing Crab. The waiter clears the plates and, Martin notes with approval, leaves the check precisely between the two of us, so that either one of us can pay. I cannot help but ask: Has she observed any etiquette violations on my part during the meal?

"If I had, I'd be too polite to tell you," she says demurely, a response that, while undeniably polite, is not altogether reassuring. And with that, she is off to rescue civilization, gently, one person at a time.

--Tim Carvell

Reporter Associates Michael H. Martin, Lenore Schiff, Wilton Woods