Is it just me, or is everyone rude now? (It’s not just me)

The woman, seated a chair or two away at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, leaned over to me when the session had finished. She said: “Do you always fidget, or do you have a particular problem today?”

What? I hadn’t been aware that I’d been fidgeting. Perhaps I’d been moving my new knee a little, just to take pleasure in the fact that my leg now works. But the movement would have been minimal. And she was seated a half-a-metre away.

I’m always discombobulated when someone is rude to me. I think most people are.

Regina George from Mean Girls had a knack for making rudeness seem like kindness. Credit: Paramount Pictures

Minutes later, I ran into Sydney writer Charlotte Wood. I told her about the nasty comment and how I’d been lost for words.

Well, worse than lost for words. Instead, I’d put on a plummy English accent – why the accent? – and said, “Madam, if I disturbed you in any way, I do apologise”, and then stomped off (to the extent that a man with a new knee can stomp anywhere).

I asked Charlotte how come I was unable to come up with something better?

“That’s nothing,” said Charlotte. “Someone was having me sign their book, and just as they were leaving, they examined me closely and said: ‘So, whose idea was the hair?’”

Charlotte is a wordsmith of dazzling skill. Her most recent book was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize. Reviewers praise her wit. Surely, Charlotte would have come up with a zinger, even if I’d failed to manage one.

Not a bit of it. She reports responding with a nervous half-laugh, a strange surge of shame – maybe the reader is right! – before quickly turning to the next customer in the queue.

When did people become so rude, even readers, those traditionally courteous folk?

English writer Howard Jacobson describes meeting a fan of his work. “Once he’d paid me a sufficient number of compliments,” writes Jacobson, “I began to back towards the exit. Experience. Sometimes if you let them use up all the compliments, they start on the insults.”

Alleged fidgeter Richard Glover.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

After a further interaction with the fan, Jacobson also reports himself lost for words. He fled, blushing.

The French have the phrase, l’esprit de l’escalier, describing the cutting response that occurs too late, when you are already heading down the stairs.

Oh, to be a person who can, in the heat of the moment, come up with the perfect comeback.

Some can. American writer Dorothy Parker was attacked by a reader who told her, “I can’t bear fools”. Parker managed to find the instant response: “Apparently, your mother could.”

Or playwright George Bernard Shaw offering theatre tickets to his friend, Winston Churchill: “Have reserved two tickets for opening night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one.” To which Churchill famously responded: “Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one.”

Or, perhaps best of all, the sledge-and-response usually ascribed to cricketers Glenn McGrath and Eddo Brandes. “Why are you so fat?” asked McGrath. Said Brandes: “Because every time I sleep with your wife, she gives me a biscuit.”

Could it be that the nastiness of the online world has finally broken its banks and flooded the real world?

What I love is the way the harsh allegation of marital infidelity – a more vivid phrase than “sleep with” may have been used – rubs shoulders with the childish delight any of us would feel upon being offered a free biscuit.

And all this thought up in an instant, out in the middle of a cricket field, under the hot sun.

Mostly, though, we stammer, and we blush; we apologise or laugh nervously. Are there better responses?

A friend of mine, a schoolteacher, says that when a child blurts out a particularly awful insult, she waits a beat, gives them a sympathetic look, and then says: “Are you OK?”

Another friend recommends the phrase, sweetly delivered: “Why would you say that?”

Or here’s another. You allow the insult to sit in the air for a few seconds, and then say: “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” as if you have been unable to believe the evidence of your own ears.

At this point, the person doing the insulting will hopefully be the one lost for words, realising that what they said was so awful they cannot bear the idea of repeating it.

Why do we need to collect such a verbal armoury when we’re out and about?

One of the remarkable features of the past decade or so has been the happy gap between “internet Australia” – a place full of trolls and meanness, and what I call “barbecue Australia” – a place of charming people who are mostly friendly and accepting, whatever their differences.

Could it be that the nastiness of the online world has finally broken its banks and flooded the real world? Perhaps after years of being able to snarl at each other online, people are so accustomed to incivility that they’ve forgotten how to behave?

If so, we need to be prepared. From now on, I’m going with the school teacher’s suggestion. Next time someone insults me, I’ll lean down and, with a look of soft concern, inquire: “Are you OK?”