Is it alright as a hostess to recycle, off used plates on to the next day’s plates, unwanted but obviously untouched expensive food such as caviar?

Lyndall Barbour, Warminster

Not many can afford to serve caviar. Not many are prodigal enough to leave any if it is served. And polite Etiket suggests that all leftovers should go to the dog or the pig-swill bucket. It is thrifty good manners to empty one’s plate. Prudence about infectious diseases makes one wary of such food recycling. Probably (certainly) happens within the family. But it should be done surreptitiously. It is bad form to swig half-finished glasses. This is a perk of the butler, if you employ one.

My daughter, when dining at a business function in Australia, was criticised for using her fork points-up in conjunction with her knife, to enjoy the liquid areas of her meal. She is conversant in social graces and was, therefore, taken aback. Does New World society have different table manners?

A. J. M., Cheltenham

Artful Apicius! The first celebrity chef. In English U society, the fork is used for spearing only; and to turn it over and use it as a shovel is deemed non-U or peasant behaviour. To spear peas with a fork demands the marksmanship of William Tell. The prudent deipnosophist mixes them into a gobbet with her mashed potato. This is not the fashion in the US, where the knife can be discarded and the fork used as a spoon. Your daughter’s critics were the ones with bad manners, to animadvert on the different eating conventions of others.

Please advise on the correct pronunciation of scone. And Evelyn.

Andrew Barnes, Stokesley

These are deep waters, Watson. Should scone rhyme with “gone” or “bone”? Is Evelyn “Everlyn” for a gel, and “Eevelyn” for a chap, as in Waugh? You could try a theory that scone/gone is U, and scone/bone is non-U. But it doesn’t work completely. You could try that scone/gone is southern, and scone/bone northern. But that doesn’t work exactly. The best recourse is to spread your scone with Cornish clotted cream and raspberry jam, and let the pronunciation go hang. And to treat Everlyn/Eevelyn amiably, whatever her/his sex. We should try to pronounce in the way of our family and friends; and writing with the best. Time and reputable publication determine the best writers, don’t they?

A small elucidation — the Royal Navy use the term “heads”, but in the US Navy they refer to “the head”. I really don’t think that they have only one per ship. I was amused by your questioner’s use of the word “lavatory” (October 18), itself a euphemism. I suppose the nearest we can get to plain words is “water closet”. Winston Churchill, afloat on the Channel, noticed a piece of flotsam and said, “Look, a door with my initials.”

Tom Fallowfield, Headsville

The original British form was singular head for a man-of-war’s privy: nautical, but perhaps rather jargon than slang or colloquial. It is recorded since the early 18th century, eg in Woodes Rogers A Cruising Voyage Round the World, 1708, and in Smollett’s Roderick Random, 1748. The general 20th-century form is the plural “heads”. As often, US usage preserves the older form. The name comes presumably from the station of a warship’s latrines in the bows. In the US the word is also used of WCs ashore. Euphemism and genteelism shroud the bogs. Heads is quite a respectable euphemism.