continuing to deny his guilt up until two years ago; he dismissed his crimes as “banter”;

With the banter and the fun.

We're already laughing and having a good time from Harry and Sally's fake orgasm banter, where there's clearly some awkwardness and repression that goes unreleased.

banter with a girl. You can crack jokes about something she said, maybe it's her taste in

You may not know this about me, but when I'm not lifting weights or making boorish, bro-y banter,

So anyways, after the back and forth, there's good banter.

The banter was a whole other level.

That adaptation to increased vigilance with the side effect of lowered emotional inhibitions might help you notice a jaguar emerging from the shadows, but it could ruin your office banter.

l'm sure it was just friendly banter.

Rousseau now contrasts favourably with modern mannered people. Rousseau tells us that people living in what he calls the state of nature were, in his eyes, far superior to educated and mannered Parisians. Their manners may have been simple, but they were honest and forthright, without the sins of what he now terms the over-civilised. Rousseau retells the story of civilisation as one of loss and decline, from a primordial state of fresh-faced curiosity, honesty and enthusiasm, to barbarous over-politeness, fakery and deceit. He describes the elaborate French court at Versailles as less civilised than an early human cave. Readers across Europe are astonished, and not a little impressed, by this impudence. For hundreds of years, moralists have been arguing that our natural selves are wild, harmful, over-sexual and dangerous, and that we must learn to tame them for the sake of others. Now Rousseau suggests the diametrical opposite. Civilisation has gone too far, it's our mannered selves that have become the problem, and the task of a properly evolved civilisation is to throw off the chains of manners, to relax us, strip off the etiquette and return to primitive frankness. Rousseau's point continues to echo down to our own times. It is his voice we can hear whenever someone sticks up for the simpler life, and suggests we dress less formally, eat dinner more casually and more readily say whatever is passing through our minds. New York, United States, 1827. A French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, is on a tour of the young United States in an effort to understand the spirit of a new kind of society, a democracy. He is immediately struck by American manners, or lack thereof. In Europe, reflects de Tocqueville, manners have been codified to emphasise hierarchical differences between people. Ordinary people defer to aristocrats, aristocrats to royalty, and so on. But in the United States, everything is done so as to suggest that there are no differences between people. No one takes off their hat to anyone, a postman can casually greet a judge, a mule driver can strike up cheerful banter with a wealthy merchant, and one cannot tell by someone's clothes whether they might be living in a mansion or a hut. Expressions like how you doing and hi are heard everywhere across the new republic. It could be charming, but the aristocratic de Tocqueville wryly notes a problem. These casual manners do not do away with class and wealth differences. They merely sentimentally disguise them. The manners of old Europe have been accused of being cruel in their stress on hierarchy.