Decorum

Decorum (pronounced dih-kawr-uhm or dih-kohr-uhm)

(1) Dignified propriety of behavior, speech, dress, demeanour etc.

(2) The quality or state of being decorous, or exhibiting such dignified propriety; orderliness; regularity.

(3) The conventions of social behaviour; an observance or requirement of one’s social group (sometimes in the plural as “decorums” the use an allusion to the many rules of etiquette (the expectations or requirements defining “correct behaviour” which, although most associated with “polite society”, do vary between societal sub-sets, differing at the margins)).

1560–1570: A learned borrowing (in the sense of “that which is proper or fitting in a literary or artistic composition”) from the Latin decōrum, noun use of neuter of decōrus (proper, decent (ie decorous) from decor (beauty, elegance, charm, grace, ornament), probably from decus (an ornament; splendor, honor), the Proto-Italic dekos (dignity), from the primitive Indo-European déḱos (that which is proper), from deḱ- (take, perceive) (and used in the sense of “to accept” on the notion of “to add grace”).  By the 1580s the use of decorum has spread from its literary adoption from the Latin to the more generalized sense of “propriety of speech, behavior or dress; formal politeness”, a resurrection of the original sense in Latin (polite, correct in behaviour, that which is seemly).  Decorously (in a decorous manner) is an adverb, decorousness (the state or quality of being decorous; a behavior considered decorous) is a noun, indecorous (improper, immodest, or indecent) and undecorous (not decorous) are adjectives).  The adjective dedecorous (disgraceful; unbecoming) is extinct.  Decorum is a noun; the noun plural is decora or decorums.

Whether on rugby pitches, race tracks, in salons & drawing rooms or geo-politics, disagreements over matters of decorum have over millennia been the source of innumerable squabbles, schisms and slaughter but linguistically, the related adjective decorous (characterized by dignified propriety in conduct, manners, appearance, character, etc) has also not been trouble-free.  Decorous seems first to have appeared in the 1650s from the Latin decōrus and akin to both decēre (to be acceptable, be fitting) and docēre (to teach (in the sense of “to make fitting”) with the adjectival suffix –ōsus appended.  In Latin, the -ōsus suffix (full, full of) was a doublet of -ose in an unstressed position and was used to form adjectives from nouns, to denote possession or presence of a quality in any degree, commonly in abundance.  English picked this up from the Middle English -ous, from the Old French –ous & -eux, from the Latin -ōsus and it became productive.  In chemistry, it has a specific technical application, used in the nomenclature to name chemical compounds in which a specified chemical element has a lower oxidation number than in the equivalent compound whose name ends in the suffix -ic.  For example sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄) has more oxygen atoms per molecule than sulphurous acid (H₂SO₃).  Decorous is an adjective, decorousness is a noun and decorously is an adverb.

In use there are two difficulties with decorous: (1) the negative forms and (2) how it should be pronounced, both issues with which mercifully few will be troubled (or even see what the fuss is about) but to a pedantic subset, much noted.  The negative forms are undecorous & indecorous (both of which rarely are hyphenated) but the meanings are differences in the meaning.  Undecorous means simply “not decorous” which can be bad enough but indecorous is used to convey “improper, immodest, or indecent” which truly can be damning in some circles so the two carefully should be applied.  There’s also the negative nondecorous but it seems never to have been a bother.  The problem is made worse by the adjective dedecorous (disgraceful; unbecoming) being extinct; it would have been a handy sort of intermediate state between the “un-” & “in-” forms and the comparative (more dedecorous) & superlative (most dedecorous) would have provided all the nuance needed.  The related forms are the nouns nondecorousness, indecorous & indecorous and the adverbs nondecorously, undecorously & undecorously.

The matter of the pronunciation of decorous is one for the pedants but there’s a lot of them about and like décor, the use is treated as a class-identifier, the correlation between pedantry and class-identifiers probably high; the two schools of thought are  dek-er-uhs & dih-kawr-uhs (the second syllable -kohr- more of a regionalism) and in 1926 when the stern Henry Fowler (1858–1933) published his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, he in his prescriptive way insisted on the former.  By 1965, when the volume was revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (1880–1966), he noted the “pronunciation has not yet settled down”, adding that “decorum pulls one way and decorate the other”.  In his revised edition, Sir Ernest distinguished still between right & wrong (a position from which, regrettably, subsequent editors felt inclined to retreat) but had become more descriptive than his predecessor of how things were done rather than how they “ought to be” done and added while “most authorities” had come to prefer dih-kawr-uhs, that other arbiter, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) had listed dek-er-uhs first and it thus “may win”.  By the 2020s, impressionistically, it would seem it has.

Décor is another where the pronunciation can be a class-identifier and in this case it extend to the spelling, something directly related.  In English, the noun décor dates from 1897 in the sense of “scenery and furnishings” and was from the eighteenth century French décor, a back-formation from the fourteenth century décorer (to decorate), from the Latin decorare (to decorate, adorn, embellish, beautify), the modern word thus duplicating the Latin decor.  The original use in English was of theatre stages and such but the term “home décor” was in use late in the 1890s to described the technique of hanging copies of old masters as home decoration.  From this evolved the general use (decorations and furnishings of a room, building etc), well established by the mid 1920s and it’s been with us ever since.  Typically sensibly, the French l'accent aigu (acute accent) (the “é” pronounced ay in French) was abandoned by the Americans without corroding society but elsewhere, décor remained preferred by among certain interior decorators and their clients, the companion French pronunciation obligatory too.

Courtoom decorum: Lindsay Lohan arriving at court, Los Angeles, 2011-2013.  All the world's a catwalk.

Top row; left to right: 9 Feb 2011; 23 Feb; 2011; 10 Mar 2011; 22 Apr 2011.
Centre row; left to right: 23 Jun 2011; 19 Oct 2011; 2 Nov 2011; 14 Dec 2011.
Bottom row; left to right: 17 Dec 2011; 30 Jan 2012; 22 Feb 2012; 28 Mar 2012.

In English, the original use of decorum was in the technical jargon of what word come to be called literary theory; decorum describing a structuralist adherence to formal convention.  It was applied especially to poetry where rules of construction abound and it was about consistency with the “canons of propriety” (in this context defined usually as “good taste, good manners & correctness” which in our age of cultural (and linguistic) relativism is something many would label as “problematic” but all are free to “plug-in” their own standards).  Less controversially perhaps, decorum was understood as the matter of behavior on the part of the poet qua ("in the capacity or character of; as being" and drawn from the Latin legal qua (acting in the capacity of, acting as, or in the manner of)) their poem and therefore what is proper and becoming in the relationship between form and substance.  That needs to be deconstructed: decorum was not about what the text described because the events variously could be thought most undecorous or indecorous but provided the author respected the character, thought and language appropriate to each, the literary demands of decorum were satisfied.  Just as one would use many different words to describe darkness compared to those used of sunlight, a work on a grand and profound theme should appear in a dignified and noble style while the trivial or humble might be earthier.

The tradition of decorum is noted as a theme in the works by the Classical authors from Antiquity but the problem there is that we have available only the extant texts and they would be but a fragment of everything created and it’s acknowledged there was much sifting and censoring undertaken in the Medieval period (notably by priests and monks who cut out “the dirty bits” and it’s not known how much was destroyed because it was thought “worthless” or worse “obscene”.  What has survived may be presumed to be something of the “best of” Antiquity and there’s no way of knowing if in Athens and Rome there were proto-post modernists who cared not a fig for literary decorum.  The Greek and Roman tradition certainly seems to have been influential however because decorum is obvious in Elizabethan plays.  In William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Much Ado About Nothing (circa 1598), the comic passages such as the badinage between Beatrice and Benedick appear for amusing effect in colloquial dramatic prose while the set-piece romantic episodes are in formal verse; the very moment Benedick and Beatrice realize they are in love, that rise in the emotional temperature is signified by them suddenly switched to poetic verse.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

By contrast, in rhetoric, the conventions of literary decorum were probably most useful when being flouted.  Winston Churchill’s (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) World War II (1939-1945) speeches are remembered now for their eloquence and grandeur but there’s much evidence that at the time many listeners regarded their form as an anachronism and preferred something punchier but what made them effective was the way he could mix light & dark, high and low to lend his words a life which transcended the essential artificiality of a speech.  Once, when discussing serious matter of international relations and legal relationships between formerly belligerent powers, he paused to suggest that while Germany might be treated harshly after all that had happened, the Italians “…might be allowed to work their passage back.” [to the community of the civilized world].  What the flouting of decorum could do was make something worthy but dull seem at least briefly interesting or at least amusing, avoiding what the British judge Lord Birkett (1883–1962) would have called listening to “the ‘refayned’ and precious accents of a decaying pontiff.”

In English literature, it was during the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries that decorum became what might now be called a fetish, a product of the reverence for what were thought to be the “Classical rules and tenets” although quite how much these owned to a widespread observance in Antiquity and how much to the rather idealized picture of the epoch painted by medieval and Renaissance scholars really isn’t clear.  Certainly, in the understanding of what decorum was there were influences ancient & modern, Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)) observing that while terms like “cow-keeper” or “hog-herd” would be thought too much the vulgar talk of the peasantry to appear in “high poetry”, to the Ancient Greeks there were no finer words in the language.  Some though interpolated the vulgarity of the vernacular just because of the shock value the odd discordant word or phrase could have, the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) clearly enjoying mixing elegance, wit and grace with the “almost brutal forcefulness” of the “the crude, the corrupt and the repulsive” and it’s worth noting he made his living also as a satirist.  His example must have appealed to the Romantic poets because they sought to escape the confines imposed by the doctrines of Neoclassicism, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) writing in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798 and co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)) that these poems were here to rebel against “false refinement” and “poetic diction”.  He may have had in mind the odd “decaying pontiff”.