If only everyone on Twitter followed Nerve’s Nine Essentials of Twitter Etiquette! (Twitiquette?) Hilarious and helpful. My favorite:

Ask yourself if you’re tweeting something out of love, or to be loved.

While you’re there, check out the cautionary Five Ways I’ve Sabotaged My Relationships With Technology. It rings skeerily familiar for a rampant, heretofore unrepentant texter/emailer/chatter like me. Yikes!

A steaming cuppa joe and a little righteous indignation make for a stimulating morning, which is why I do all my blog-reading before noon. In other words, I was all prepared to be annoyed by this Lemondrop post — “Hey Ladies, Can You Stop Doing This on Dates With Me? Thanks” — but I have to say, Redacted Guy gets it mostly right. Most of his first-date tips spring from simple good etiquette — don’t be snippy with wait staff, don’t keep checking your cell phone — and some are perhaps targeted to the clueless amongst us, male and female, who can’t pick up subtle clues about when it’s time to move on.

I appreciate that the palpable exasperation behind this list of “don’ts” doesn’t translate, as it so often does elsewhere, to gender-flaming and meanness.

So! In that spirit of learning and not just griping…what are your top out-on-a-date “don’ts”?

Young ladies, not quite sure of the proper behavior post-deflowerment? Have we got the hilariously droll parody of an etiquette book for you! This 1965 jem by Mel Juffe and Edward Gorey (!) was recently rediscovered through the magic of the internets. Click the picture for its complete posting by Accordion Guy.

Those dirty rings! As part of their application for the Evil League of Evil, the sly devils over at Boston-based wireless communications provider Mobile Sphere have created a no-cost (if you don’t mind a few ads) service called SlyDial that allows you to call directly into someone’s voice mail — ring-free. It’s being marketed mainly as a tool to help bizzy people who have never heard of email return calls without ever interacting with other humans small-talk time-suck. But according to the “SlyDial Situations” section of the service’s website, it will also help you avoid certain uncomfy conversations in particular: calling in sick when you’re fine; explaining your credit card bill to your parents; wishing a friend a belated (like, 3 AM) birthday. Hmm. If we think really really really hard, could we also come up with some other applications in the area of love (or lack thereof)?

Oh wait! SlyDial beat us to it: “You are dating quite a few people at the same time. You don’t want to leave them all text messages because there is nothing romantic about that. But a nice voicemail to each would score you points.” Mmmm. Now that’s romantic.

Here, your weekly installment of Ask Lynn, BG’s alter ego’s column at MSN.com (powered by Match.com). This week, we meet “Very Puzzled,” who asks Lynn to resolve yet another age-old question: “Who pays for the date?” VP, it should be noted, is new at this … again. A single 40-year-old woman, she’s been in school and out of the pool for a while. Now that she’s back, she writes, “I find that most men I have met expect ‘Dutch treat’… . When did the world change so much? Am I just meeting stingy guys, or is it now the right etiquette for me to expect to pay my own way even if asked out? Am I just too old-fashioned to date?”

Far as Lynn is concerned, the central who-pays question can be answered in three little words. (But, of course, she adds a few more.) Check out the whole Q&A, and then come back here to leave your own tips. (I mean, if your date paid the bill, you should at least offer.)

Maybe it won’t surprise any of you to find out that roughly 50% of Canadians — reputed to be the politest people in the Northern hemisphere (the Minnesotans being too polite to challenge them) — break up in private places, mainly their own homes, so as not to embarrass the other person. (Or, um, because it’s cold outside?)

The Vancover Sun article bearing the news — based on a recent poll by Ipsos Reid — quotes psychology professor Guy Grenier as saying, “I suppose that’s probably a good indication of relationship etiquette.” I suppose. But just because a breakup happens in private doesn’t mean it feels private. I mean, the most humiliating place I was ever broken up with was in my own bedroom. Would have been private, I guess, if there hadn’t been a PARTY going on downstairs. I’ll cry if I want to, thanks!

By the way, call me an impolite New Yorker, but aren’t they focusing on the wrong half of the respondents? I mean, where are all those other people breaking up? Gretzky’s?

(By the way #2, the comments section here would be a good place to share your own good/bad/ugly breakup-location stories. Especially you, our neighbors to the north.)