In the French culture, and in many others as well, meals are codified social events, rich in behavioral conventions referred to as “table manners:” gestures, use of special eating tools, eating protocols, etc. On the linguistic side, there exists a significant set of prefabricated but semantically compositional linguistic expressions, called “linguistic clichés” in Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology (e.g. Fr. “On ne parle pas la bouche pleine,” which corresponds to Eng. “Don’t talk with your mouth full”), which are prototypically used during meals. These linguistic clichés fully participate in the ritual associated with social interactions during meals, in relation to table manners. In this paper, we examine linguistic clichés of table manners in French. After introducing the paper’s topic (section 1), we propose a definition of the notion of table manners (section 2); we then proceed with a characterization of linguistic clichés of table manners (section 3), before attacking the plat de résistance: the study of a set of French linguistic clichés of table manners that we believe is representative of this type of phraseme (section 4).