The unwritten rule, he said, is that you let the pitcher reach the dugout before congratulating him.
In common with the doctor in Mr. Albee's unwritten play, he is at the top of his profession.
Respecting one of the instrument's unwritten rules, he plays antique songs like "Dream a Little Dream of Me" and "Tonight You Belong to Me" (you may remember Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters singing that one in "The Jerk").
As for whether Mr. Goldstein can sneak a peek at the e-mail messages bleeping in on his wireless pager during dinner with his wife, "There are unwritten rules," he added.
That stack of 250 blank postcards started to look "awfully like an unwritten book", he says, but the cards are now being sent out and the book, a literary SF novel set in the Nevada desert, called Connect, is due out from Picador next year.
For all McKee's gloom, and his love of stories in which grown men cry (the category includes "Casablanca," "Tender Mercies," and his own unwritten novel), he is driven by a kind of melancholy optimism: "Hopefully, you can live in a way so that you can die with the notion that, on balance, the sense of achievement outweighs the regret".
"This formalises an unwritten rule: he who wants his manuscripts reviewed, reviews other manuscripts in return," explains Janne-Tuomas Seppänen, a postdoc at University of Jyväskylä, who came up with the initial idea for Peerage of Science service in February 2010.
"We took for granted that there was a code of behavior under which science operates, but what we've seen for the past 8 years is a breaking of that unwritten code," he told ScienceInsider.
Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal he struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who dominated state governments after Reconstruction.
He had no intention of making a film, but when he began sifting through them several years ago to jog his memory for an as-yet-unwritten book, he thought there might be a cinematic story to tell.
