Fundamentally, though, ManServants claims to answer a time-honoured question: What do women want?
It pertains instead to the theatrical equivalent of that time-honoured question most frequently applied to giving a party: what if you advertised one of the world's defining theatre posts, and nobody came?
Many of the pieces were written originally for Esquire, where Ephron worked as, put simply, the female columnist, trying to resolve for the magazine's male readers that time-honoured question of what women want.
Further, whether physiological bases of fatigue are present, or whether reductions in the motivation to perform are altered, is a time-honoured question.
This time honoured practice has been challenged recently with reports of less morbidity associated with antibiotic treatment than surgery in uncomplicated acute appendicitis.
At any rate in Great Britain it is a custom, a time-honoured one, to ask questions of candidates for parliament and ask questions of members of the government.
Or from the Florida professor engaging in the time-honoured conspiracy-theorist strategy of Just Asking Questions: "While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place …" This is all repellent nonsense, obviously.
Pottering in the garden and intellectual inquiry are time-honoured forms of respectable laziness.
Or at least, his inquiry begins in time-honoured style: "Are you having a good time?" The crowd cheers.
The most efficient identification technique that is, the questioning of witnesses is also the most time-honoured.
With all these different methods of courtship going on – each of them quietly teasing us away from the time-honoured tradition of person meets person on a night out, drinks six pints and does some sex – the question is whether or not technology will eventually become the one and only way humans form romantic relationships.
