Life & Wisdom Quote by Florence King

King’s line doesn’t just sneer at manners; it indicts the way “harmless” social rules metastasize into moral policing. The first move is her scalpel-like metaphor shift: etiquette as a “bee sting” suggests a brief, petty pain - the kind you shrug off as the price of being around other people. Then she upgrades it to a “snake bite,” a wound that spreads, poisons, and can kill. That escalation is the point: conventions we treat as trivial aren’t neutral background noise. They’re often the delivery system for a community’s harshest judgments.

The phrase “pointless conventions” is doing sly work. King isn’t railing against all norms, only the ones kept alive for their own sake - rituals whose original purpose has evaporated, leaving behind pure enforcement. In that vacuum, convention becomes a proxy for virtue. If you refuse the rule, the logic goes, you must be refusing goodness itself. That’s how dress codes become morality plays, how “proper” speech becomes a class gate, how sexual and gender expectations get laundered as “just how we do things.”

King wrote with a mordant, contrarian edge in a late-20th-century American culture that loved calling itself liberated while still running on quiet liturgies of respectability. Her intent reads as warning and diagnosis: etiquette is rarely only etiquette. It’s a low-drama mechanism for sorting the righteous from the suspect, granting social innocence to the conformist and social suspicion to anyone who won’t perform the script.