Malevolent, malicious & malignant

Malevolent (pronounced muh-lev-uh-luhnt)

(1) Wishing evil or harm to another or others; showing ill will; ill-disposed; malicious.

(2) Evil; harmful; injurious.

(3) In astrology, a force evil or malign in influence.

1500–1510:  From the Middle English malevolent (suggested by Middle English malevolence (analyzed of late as “male violence”)), from the Old French malivolent and the Latin malevolentem, the construct being male (badly, ill, wrongly) + volens (wanting, willing, wishing”), the present participle of velle (to want, wish for, desire).  The most commonly used form in Latin appears to have been malevolēns (ill-disposed, spiteful).  Upon entering English in the sixteenth century, the word retained this sense of ill will or harmful intent.  The adjective malevolent (having an evil disposition toward another or others, wishing evil to others) dates from the early sixteenth century while the noun malevolence (the character of being ill-disposed toward another or others; ill-will, malice, personal hatred) was in use by the mid-fifteenth, from the Old French malevolence and directly from Latin malevolentia (ill-will, dislike, hatred), from malevolentem (nominative malevolens) (ill-disposed, wishing ill, spiteful, envious).  The antonym is benevolent and the usual negative forms are unmalevolent & non-malevolent.  Malevolent is an adjective, malevolence is a noun and malevolently is an adverb; the noun plural malevolences.

The writings of Russian-American author & mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (often styled Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891; co-founder of the Theosophical Society (1875)) were in the nineteenth century influential in non-mainstream theology and philosophy circles.  Her work included exploring "…the horrifying principles and malignant influence of the Society of Jesus [the Jesuit Order, a Roman Catholic cult] are brought out in the open for all to see, hitherto secret ciphers of the so-called higher Masonic degrees revealed, examples of Jesuit cryptography exposed, and a High Mason’s critical strictures upon Masonry itself articulated.”   In July 1773, Clement XIV (1705–1774; pope 1769-1774), acting on a request from many governments disturbed by the Jesuits’ plotting and scheming, issued the brief Dominus ac Redemptor (Lord and Redeemer) which dissolved the cult.  However, the Jesuits went underground and conducted a masonic-like infiltration of the Church which culminated in the pressure exerted on Pius VII (1742–1823; pope 1800-1823) who in 1814 issued the papal bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum (The care of all Churches) allowing the order to be re-established and resume its Masonic ways.

Malicious (pronounced muh-lish-uhs)

(1) Full of, characterized by, or showing malice; intentionally harmful; spiteful.

(2) In common law jurisdictions, vicious, wanton, or mischievous in motivation or purpose (often in statute as an “aggravating circumstance”).

(3) In common law jurisdictions as malicious prosecution, an intentional tort which arises from a party (1) intentionally and maliciously instituting or pursuing (or causing to be instituted or pursued) a legal action (civil or criminal) that is (2) brought without probable cause and (3) dismissed in favor of the other party.  It belongs sometimes to the class of actions called “abuse of process”.

(4) In common law jurisdictions as “malicious prosecution”, a common law intentional tort which arises from a party (1) intentionally and maliciously instituting or pursuing (or causing to be instituted or pursued) a legal action (civil or criminal) that is (2) brought without probable cause and (3) dismissed in favor of the other party.

(5) In common law jurisdictions as “malicious mischief”, the willful, wanton, or reckless destruction of the personal property of another occasioned by actual ill will or resentment toward the owner or possessor of such property.

1175–1225: From the Middle English malicious (which may have existed in the Old English as malicius but this is contested), from the Old French malicios (showing ill will, spiteful, wicked (which persists in Modern French as malicieux)) from the Latin malitiōsus (wicked, malicious), the construct being maliti(a) (badness; ill will; spite), from malus (bad; evil) + -osus.  In Latin, the -ōsus suffix was added to a noun to form an adjective indicating an abundance of that noun.  The Middle English form displaced the earlier native Middle English ivelwilled & ivelwilly (malicious), both related to the Old English yfelwillende (literally “evil-willing”).  In early fourteenth century Anglo-French legal language, it meant “characterized by malice prepense”, essentially little different from the sense “malicious” today enjoys in statute in common law jurisdictions.  The adverb maliciously (in a spiteful manner, with enmity or ill-will) emerged in the late fourteenth century while the noun maliciousness (extreme enmity or disposition to injure; actions prompted by hatred) was in use a few decades later.  The spelling malitious is obsolete.  The usual negative forms are non-malicious & unmalicious but lexicographers note also the use of semi-malicious & quasi-malicious, forms adopted presumably when some nuance of the evil done seems helpful.  At the other end of the scale of maliciousness, the comparative is more malicious and the superlative most malicious.  Malicious is an adjective, maliciousness is a noun and maliciously is an adverb.

Malignant (pronounced muh-lig-nuhnt)

(1) Disposed to cause harm, suffering, or distress deliberately; feeling or showing ill will or hatred.

(2) Very dangerous or harmful in influence or effect.

(3) In pathology, tending to produce death.

(4) In medicine (usually of cells or a tumor), characterized by uncontrolled growth; cancerous, invasive, or metastatic.

1540s: From the Middle French malignant, from the Late Latin malignantem (nominative malignans) (acting from malice), stem of malignāns, present participle of malignāre (to act maliciously; to behave with malign intent) and malignō (to malign, viciously to act).  The English malign (evil or malignant in disposition, nature, intent or influence) was from the Middle English maligne, from the Old French maligne, from the Latin malignus, the construct being malus (bad) + -gnus (born), from gignere (to bear, beget) from the primitive Indo-European root gene- (give birth, beget).  In medicine (of tumors and such), the antonym is “benign” but non-malignant & unmalignant both exist as does semi-malignant which sounds strange to non-clinical ears but which is used apparently with the sense of “not very malignant”, presumably something of a comfort to a patient.  The most commonly distinction in medicine seems to be between “malignant” and “benign” and this provide the author Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) with one of his better jabs.  Learning that the notoriously obnoxious Randolph Churchill (1911-1968) had been operated on after a tumor was found, when told it had been removed and sent for an analysis which proved it “benign”, he observed: “What a miracle that modern medicine could find the only part of Randolph that is not malignant and then remove it.”  Malignant is an adjective, malignancy & malignance are nouns, malignantly is an adverb; the noun plural is malignancies.

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

The word entered the medical jargon in the 1560s but the earlier use was as a theological slur, the Church describing as malignant “those damnable followers of the antichrist” in the ecclesiam malignantum (best translated as “Church of the Wicked”), a concept found in many writings in early Christian thought, particularly among certain groups that emphasized the contrast between the true, faithful Church and those who they believed were corrupt or evil within the broader Christian community.  The theme continues to this day and can be identified as the source of many schisms and internecine conflicts within and between many religions.  The term existed in a number of Latin Christian writings, often linked to Augustinian theology.  Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430), in his work attacking the Donatists (a Christian sect which in the fourth century forced a schism in the Church of Carthage) referenced the ecclesia malignantium to describe those within the Church who were corrupt or sinful, in contrast to the ecclesia sancta (the holy Church).  It was Augustine who constructed the influential doctrine that while within the Church, there could be both saints and sinners, ultimately the Church itself remained holy, an interesting proto-structralism upon which churches of many denominations to this day fall back upon in their handling of clerical scandals.

The ecclesia malignantium were used metaphorically to contrast the “true” Church (those who genuinely followed Christ) with those who may have been Christian in name but acted in ways that were contrary to Christian teachings, thus aligning themselves with evil or wickedness.  In the secular world, the model is not unfamiliar, a modern example being those in the US Republican Party not judged sufficiently “pure” by the right-wing fanatics being labeled “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only), an idea Saint Augustine would have recognized.  So, faith and politics can both be binary exercises, those judged heretical, schismatic, or in some way morally corrupt being a malignant presence in the community and needing to be excised as swiftly as the surgeon’s scalpel slices out a malignant tumor.  During the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation in Europe, the language was re-purposed, by the 1540s used by protestant theologians and activists to condemn as heretics the pope and the Church in Rome.  By the 1590s, malignant was in use to mean (of persons) “disposed to inflict suffering or cause distress” whereas in the early fourteenth century “malign” was used as an adjective and the now extinct malignous meant “poisonous, noxious”.  The noun malignancy dates from circa 1600 and by mid century had come to mean “state of extreme malevolence, bitter enmity”, the particular use in medicine (of diseases, growths, tumors etc with a virulence and tendency to get worse) appears in the medical literature from the 1680s.  In English history, borrowing from the turbulent priests, both the followers of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658; Lord Protector of the Commonwealth 1653-1658) and the royalist forces would label each other “malignants”.

In English, “mal-” words are familiar.  The mal- prefix was from the Old French mal- (bad; badly) from the Latin adverb male, from malus (bad, wicked).  In English the prefix was applied to create words variously with some denotation of the negative including (1) bad, badly (malinfluence), (1) unhealthy; harmful (malware), (3) unpleasant (malodorous) (4) incorrect (malformed), (5) incomplete (maldescent) & (6) deficiently (malnourished).  Malevolent, malicious & malignant are from a different linage but all are in some way negative on nature but there are differences between them:  Malevolent means “having or showing a desire to cause harm to others and carries the connotation of “a deep-rooted ill will or hatred”.  Malicious means “intending to do harm, typically without justification” and connotes something of an emphasis on a “spiteful or cruel intent”.  Malignant means “harmful, dangerous, or likely to cause death and while historically it was used to refer to “extreme malevolence”, the use in medicine has in the modern age tended to make that use almost exclusive although it can still be used of anything (or anyone) actively harmful or evil.  So in use, the modern tendency is for malevolent to be used of “ill will or hatred”, malicious “an intent to cause harm” and malignant “something that is dangerously harmful, often in a physical or medical context”.  The related "malign" seems most be used of intent and harmful speech.  Which to use hangs also on intent; if someone is murdered by the Freemasons, it’s not unreasonable to suppose the intent was malicious and the act malevolent but had they been eaten by a shark while swimming, neither word should be invoked because that’s just a thing sharks do.

Decker

Decker (pronounced dek-er)

(1) Something (typically a bus, ship, aircraft, bed, sandwich et al), having a specified number of decks, floors, levels, layers and such (used usually in combination with a numerical or other expression indicating the number in the construction (double decker, triple decker, upper decker, five decker etc (sometimes hyphenated).

(2) As “table decker” an employee who “decks” (ie sets or adorns) a table used for entertaining (used also as a “coverer”) (archaic).  The idea lives on in the verb “bedeck” (to adorn).

(3) In boxing slang, a fighter with a famously powerful punch, able to “deck” an opponent (ie knock them to the canvas with a single punch).

(4) In historic naval slang, as “quarter-decker”, a label applied to officers known more for their attention to matters of etiquette or trivial regulations than competent seamanship or ability in battle.  It was an allusion to a warship’s “quarter deck” (the part of the spar-deck of a man-of-war (warship) between the poop deck and main-mast (and originally (dating from the 1620s), a smaller deck above the half-deck, covering about a quarter of the vessel’s LOA (length overall)).  In many navies, the quarter-deck was reserved as “a promenade for officers only”.

1785–1795: The construct was deck + -er.  Deck in this context was from the Middle English dekke (covering extending from side to side over part of a ship), from a nautical use of the Middle Dutch decke & dec (roof, covering), from the Middle Dutch decken, from the Proto-Germanic thakam (source also of the noun “thatch” and from the primitive Indo-European root steg & teg- (to cover) and the Old Dutch thecken, from the Proto-West Germanic þakkjan, from the Proto-Germanic þakjaną and related to the German Decke (covering, blanket).  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals.  In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb.   The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun.  The noun double-decker was first used in 1835 of ships with two decks above the water line and this extended to land transport (trains) in 1867.  Decker is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is deckers.

Flight deck of the US Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70).

The reason ships, trains, buses, aircraft and such have "decks" while buildings have "floors” or “stories (or storeys)” is traceable to nautical history and the nomenclature used in shipbuilding.  English picked up “deck” from the Middle Dutch decke & dec (roof, covering) where the use had been influenced by the Old Norse þekja (to cover) and in early shipbuilding, a “deck” was the structure which covered the hull of the ship, providing both a horizontal “working surface” and enclosing the vessel, creating a space for stores, cargo or accommodation which was protected from the elements.  In that sense the first nautical decks acted as a “roof”.  As ships became larger, the nautical architects began to include multiple decks, analogous with the floors of buildings in that they fulfilled a similar function, providing segregated layers (ie the storeys in buildings) used for cannons, crew quarters, storage and such.  As the terminology of shipbuilding became standardized, each deck came to have a specific name depending on its purpose or position (main deck, flight deck, poop deck, gun deck etc).

Ford Mustang convertible (1965–1973) replacement floor pan (complete, part number 3648B) by Moonlight Drive Sheet Metal.

Until the nineteenth century, although the vehicles used on land became larger, they tended to get longer rather than higher but the advent of steam propulsion made possible trains which ran on railways and these could pull carriages carrying freight or passengers.  The first “double decker” versions appeared in France in 1867 and were described as voitures à imperial, (imperial cars) were used on the Chemin de Fer de l'Ouest (Western Railway), the upper deck roofless and thus an “open-air experience”,  Rapidly, the idea spread and double-deck carriages became common for both long-distance and commuter services.  An outlier in the terminology is car design; cars have a floor (sometimes called the “floor pan”) rather than a deck, presumably because there’s only ever one.  In the narrow technical sense there have been cars with “two floors” but they were better understood as a “double-skinned” single floor and they were used for armor or to provide a space for something specialized such as hydrogen fuel-cells, the technique often called “sandwich construction”.

Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat cutaway (left) and front schematics of Boeing 747-300 (right).  Re-using some of an earlier design for a bomber which failed to meet the military’s performance criteria, between 1938-1941, Boeing built twelve 314 Clippers, long-range flying boats with the range to cross both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  Although used by the military during World War II, most of their service was with the two commercial operators Pan Am (originally Pan American Airways) and BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation).  Very much a machine of the pre-war age, the last Clippers were retired from service between 1946-1948, the advances in aviation and ground infrastructure built during war-time rendering them obsolete and prohibitively expensive to maintain.

Because train designers adopted the nautical terminology, it naturally came to be used also in buses, and aircraft, the term “flight deck” (where the pilot(s) sat) common even before multiple decks appeared on flying boats and other long-distance airframes.  The famous “bubble” of the Boeing 747 (1968-2023) remains one of the best known decks and although most associated with the glamour of first-class international travel, was designed originally as a freight compartment.  The multi-deck evolution continued and the Airbus A380 (2005-2021) was the first “double decker” with two passenger decks extending the full length of the fuselage (with cargo & baggage) carried in the space beneath hence the frequent description of the thing as a “triple decker”.

Lindsay Lohan contemplating three decker sandwich, now usually called a “club sandwich”.  Many menus do specify the number of decks in the clubs.

Deck widely was used of many raised flat surface which people could walk or stand upon (balcony, porch, patio, flat rooftop etc) and came to be used of the floor-like covering of the horizontal sections or compartments, of a ship, a use later extended to land transport (trains, busses etc) and in the twentieth century, to aircraft.  A pack or set of playing cards can be called a deck as (less commonly), can the dealt cards which constitute the “hand” of each player and the notion was extended to sets of just about anything vaguely similar (such as a collection of photographic slides). , Because slides tended to be called a “deck” only when in their magazine, this influenced the later use in IT when certain objects digitally were assemble for storage or use and in audio and video use when cartridges or cassettes were loaded into “tape decks”.  In print journalism, a deck is a headline consisting of one or more full lines of text (applied especially to a sub-headline).  The slang use in the trade of illicit narcotics to describe the folded paper used for distributing drugs was a US regionalism.  There are dozens of idiomatic and other uses of deck, the best known including “all hands on deck”, “swab the decks”, “hit the deck” “clear the decks”, “deck-chair”, “deckhand”, “deck shoes”, “flight deck”, “gun deck”, “observation deck”, “play with a full deck”, “promenade deck”, “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”, “decked out”, “stack the deck”, “sun deck”, “top deck” & “to deck someone”.

Schematic of the Royal Navy’s HMS Victory, a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line, laid down in 1759 and launched in 1765, most famous as the flagship of Admiral Lord Nelson’s (1758-1805) flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805; it was on her Nelson was killed in battle.  Uniquely, after 246 years on the active list, she is the world's oldest naval vessel still in commission.  Although the term wasn’t in use until the 1830s, Victory was a “five decker” configured thus:

Orlop Deck: The lowest deck, mainly used for storage and ship's equipment.
Lower Gun Deck: The deck housing the heaviest cannons.
Middle Gun Deck: This deck contained another set of guns, slightly lighter than those on the lower gun deck.
Upper Gun Deck: The third level of guns, with even lighter cannons.
Quarterdeck and Forecastle: The uppermost decks, where the captain and officers usually directed the ship during battle.

The early meanings in English evolved from “covering” to “platform of a ship” because of the visual similarity and it’s thought the idea of a deck being a “pack of cards” (noted in the 1590s) was based on them being stacked like the decks of a multi-deck man-of-war (warship).  The tape-deck was first so described in 1949 an was a reference to the flat surface of the old reel-to-reel tape recorders.  The first deck chairs were advertised in 1844, an allusion to the use of such thing on the decks of passenger ocean liners and deck shoes were those with sturdy rubber soles suitable for use on slippery surfaces; the modern “boat shoes” are a descendent.  The old admiralty phrase “clear the decks” dated from the days of the tall-masted warships (the best known of which was the big “ship-of-the-line”) and was a reference to the need to remove from the main deck the wreckage resulting from an attack (dislodged masts, sails, spas etc) to enable the battle to be rejoined without the obstructions.  Being made of wood, the ships were hard to sink but highly susceptible to damage, especially to the rigging which, upon fragmentation, tended to fall to the deck.  It may have been a adaptation of the French army slang débarasser le pont (clear the bridge).

Ford 302 cubic inch (4.9 litre) Windsor V8 with the standard deck (left) and the raised deck 351 (5.8) (right).  In production in various displacements between 1961-2000, the 221 (3.6), 255 (4.2), 260 (4.3), 289 (4.7) & 302 (4.9) all used what came retrospectively to be called the “standard deck” while the 351 (5.8) was the sole “raised deck” version.

For decades, it was common for US manufacturers to increase the displacement of their V8 engines but means of creating a “raised deck” version, the process involving raising the height of the engine block's deck surface (the surface where the cylinder heads bolt on).  What this allowed was the use of longer connecting rods while using the original heads and pistons which in combination with a “longer stroke crankshaft” increases the displacement (the aggregate volume of all cylinders).  The industry slang for such things was “decker” and the technique was used with other block configurations but is best known from the use in the 1960s & 1970s for V8s because it’s those which tend to be fetishized.  The path to greater displacement lay either in lengthening the stroke or increasing the bore (or a combination of the two) and while there were general engineering principles (longer stroke=emphasis on more torque at the cost of reducing maximum engine speed and bigger bore=more power and higher engine speeds) but there were limitations in how much a bore could safely be increased including the available metal.  A bigger bore (ie increasing the internal diameter of the cylinder) reduces the thickness of the cylinder walls and if they become too thing, there can be problems with cooling, durability or even the structural integrity of the block.  The piston size also increases which means the weight increases and thus so too does the reciprocating mass, increasing friction, wear and has the potential to compromise reliability, especially at high engine speeds.

Increasing the stroke will usually enhance the torque output, something of greater benefit to most drivers, most of the time than the “top end power” most characteristic of the “big bore” approach.  In street use, most engines spend most time at low or mid-range speed and it’s here a longer stroke tends to produce more torque so it has been a popular approach and the advantage for manufacturers is that creating a “decker” almost always is easier, faster and cheaper than arranging one which will tolerate a bigger bore, something which can demand a new block casting and sometimes changes to the physical assembly line.  With a raised deck, there can be the need to use different intake and exhaust manifolds and some other peripheral components but it’s still usually a cheaper solution than a new block casting.  Ford’s “thinwall” Windsor V8 was one of the longest-serving deckers (although the raised-deck version didn’t see out the platform’s life, the 351 (introduced in 1969) retired in 1997).  Confusingly, during the Windsor era, Ford also produced other 351s which belonged to a different engine family.  Ford didn’t acknowledge the biggest Windsor's raised deck in its designation but when Chrysler released a decker version of the “B Series” big-block V8 (1958-1978), it was designated “RB” (Raised B) and produced between 1959-1979.

1964 AEC Routemaster double decker Bus RM1941 (ALD941B) (left), two sightseeing AEC Routemasters in Christchurch, New Zealand (centre) and one of the "new" Routemasters, London 2023 (right).

London’s red, double-decker busses are one of the symbols most associated with the city and a fixture in literature, art and films needing something with which to capture the verisimilitude.  The classic example of the breed was the long-running AEC Routemaster, designed by the London Transport Board and built by the Associated Equipment Company (AEC) and Park Royal Vehicles.  The Routemaster entered service in 1956 and remained in production until 1968, changed over those years in many details but visually there was such continuity that it takes an expert (and buses are a thing so experts there are) to pick the model year.  They entered service in 1956 and remained in regular service until 2005 although some were retained as “nostalgia pieces” on designated “tourist” routes until COVID-19 finally saw their retirement; since then, many have been repurposed for service around the world on sightseeing duties and other tourist projects.

Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022) will leave an extraordinary political legacy which in time may came to be remembered more fondly than it now may appear but one of his most enduring achievements is likely to be the “New Routemaster” which had the typically bureaucratic project name “New Bus for London” but came to be known generally as the “Boris Bus”, the honor accorded by virtue of him championing the idea while serving as Lord Mayor of London (2008-2016).  In truth, the original Routemaster, whatever its period charm, was antiquated years before it was withdrawn from service and although the doorless design made ingress and egress convenient, it was also dangerous and apparently a dozen passenger fatalities annually was not uncommon.  The Borisbus entered service in 2012 and by 2024 almost 1200 were in service.

1930 Lancia Omicron with 2½ deck coachwork and a clerestoried upper windscreen (left) and a “three decker” bus in Pakistan (right).

The Lancia Omicron was a bus chassis produced between 1927-1936; over 600 were built in different wheelbase lengths with both two and three-axle configurations.  Most used Lancia's long-serving, six-cylinder commercial engine but, as early as 1933, some had been equipped with diesel engines which were tested in North Africa where they proved durable and, in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya and Algeria, once petrol powered Omicron chassis were being re-powered with diesel power-plants from a variety of manufacturers as late as the 1960s.  Typically of bus use, coachbuilders fabricated many different styles of body but, in addition to the usual single and double deck arrangements, the Omicron is noted for a number of two and a half deck models, the third deck configured usually as a first-class compartment but in at least three which operated in Italy, they were advertised as “smoking rooms”, the implication presumably that the rest of the passenger compartment was smoke-free.  History doesn't record if the bus operators were any more enthusiastic about or successful in enforcing smoking bans than the usual Italian experience.  For a variety of reasons, busses with more than 2.something decks were rare and the Lancias and Alfa Romeos which first emerged in the 1920s were unusual.  However, the famously imaginative and inventive world of Pakistani commerce has produced a genuine “three decker” bus, marketed as the “limousine bus”.  What the designer did was take a long-distance, double decker coach and use the space allocated usually as a luggage compartment to configure as the interior of a long wheelbase (LWB) limousine, thereby creating a “first class” section, the four rows of seating accessible via six car-like (ie limousine) doors.

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”.

Monolith

Monolith (pronounced mon-uh-lith)

(1) A column, large statue etc, formed originally from a single block of stone but latter day use applies the term to structures formed from any material and not of necessity a single piece (although technically such a thing should be described using the antonym: “polylith”.

(2) Used loosely, a synonym of “obelisk”.

(3) A single block or piece of stone, especially when used in architecture or sculpture and applied most frequently to large structures.

(4) Something (or an idea or concept) having a uniform, massive, redoubtable, or inflexible quality or character.

(5) In architecture, a large hollow foundation piece sunk as a caisson and having a number of compartments that are filled with concrete when it has reached its correct position

(6) An unincorporated community in Kern County, California, United States (initial capital).

(7) In chemistry, a substrate having many tiny channels that is cast as a single piece, which is used as a stationary phase for chromatography, as a catalytic surface etc.

(8) In arboreal use, a dead tree whose height and size have been reduced by breaking off or cutting its branches (use rare except in UK horticultural use).

1829: The construct was mono- + lith.  Mono was from the Ancient Greek, a combining form of μόνος (monos) (alone, only, sole, single), from the Proto-Hellenic mónwos, from the primitive Indo-European mey- (little; small).  It was related to the Armenian մանր (manr) (slender, small), the Ancient Greek μανός (manós) (sparse, rare), the Middle Low German mone & möne, the West Frisian meun, the Dutch meun, the Old High German muniwa, munuwa & munewa (from which German gained Münne (minnow).  As a prefix, mono- is often found in chemical names to indicate a substance containing just one of a specified atom or group (eg a monohydrate such as carbon monoxide; carbon attached to a single atom of oxygen). 

In English, the noun monolith was from the French monolithe (object made from a single block of stone), from Middle French monolythe (made from a single block of stone) and their etymon the Latin monolithus (made from a single block of stone), from the Ancient Greek μονόλιθος (monólithos) (made from a single block of stone), the construct being μονο- (mono-) (the prefix appended to convey the meaning “alone; single”), from μόνος (monos) + λίθος (líthos) (a stone; stone as a substance).  The English form was cognate with the German monolith (made from a single block of stone).  The verb was derived from the noun.  Monolith is a noun & verb, monolithism, monolithicness & monolithicity are nouns, monolithic is an adjective and monolithically is an adverb; the noun plural is monoliths.  The adjective monolithal is listed as "an archaic form of monolithic".

Monolith also begat two back-formations in the technical jargon of archaeology: A “microlith” is (1) a small stone tool (sometimes called a “microlite”) and (2) the microscopic acicular components of rocks.  A “megalith” is (1) a large stone slab making up a prehistoric monument, or part of such a monument, (2) A prehistoric monument made up of one or more large stones and (3) by, extension, a large stone or block of stone used in the construction of a modern structure.  The terms seem not to be in use outside of the technical literature of the profession.  The transferred and figurative use in reference to a thing or person noted for indivisible unity is from 1934 and is now widely used in IT, political science and opinion polling.  The adjective monolithic (formed of a single block of stone) was in use by the early nineteenth century and within decades was used to mean “of or pertaining to a monolith”, the figurative sense noted since the 1920s.  The adjective prevailed over monolithal which seems first to have appeared in a scientific paper in 1813.  The antonym in the context of structures rendered for a single substance is “polylith” but use is rare and multi-component constructions are often described as “monoliths”.  The antonym in the context of “anything massive, uniform, and unmovable, especially a towering and impersonal cultural, political, or social organization or structure” is listed by many sources as “chimera” but terms like “diverse”, “fragmented” etc are usually more illustrative for most purposes.  In general use, there certainly has been something of a meaning-shift.  While "monolith" began as meaning "made of a single substance", it's now probably most used to covey the idea of "something big & tall" regardless of the materials used.

One of the Monoliths as depicted in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 

The mysterious black structures in Sir Arthur C Clarke's (1917–2008) Space Odyssey series (1968-1997) became well known after the release in 1968 of Stanley Kubrick's (1928–1999) film of the first novel in the series, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Although sometimes described as “obelisk”, the author noted they were really “monoliths”.  In recent years, enthusiasts, mischief makers and click-bait hunters have been erecting similar monoliths in remote parts of planet Earth, leaving them to be discovered and publicized.  With typical alacrity, modern commerce noted the interest  and soon, replicas were being offered for sale, a gap in the market for Christmas gifts between US$10,000-45,000 apparently identified.

The terms “obelisk” and “monolith” are sometimes used interchangeably and while in the case of many large stone structures this can be appropriate, the two terms have distinct meanings.  Classically, an obelisk is a tall, four-sided, narrow pillar that tapers to a pyramid-like point at the top.  Obelisks often are carved from a single piece of stone (and are thus monolithic) but can also be constructed in sections and archaeologists have discovered some of the multi-part structures exists by virtue of necessity; intended originally to be a single piece of stone, the design was changed after cracks were detected.  A monolith is a large single block stone which can be naturally occurring (such as a large rock formation) or artificially shaped; monoliths take many forms, including obelisks, statues and even buildings.  Thus, while an obelisk can be a monolith, not all monoliths are obelisks.

Highly qualified German content provider Chloe Vevrier (b 1968) standing in front of the Luxor Obelisk, Paris 2010.

The Luxor Obelisk sits in the centre of the Place de la Concorde, one of the world’s most photographed public squares.  Of red granite, 22.5 metres (74 feet) in height and weighing an estimated 227 tonnes (250 short (US) tons), it is one of a pair, the other still standing front of the first pylon of the Luxor Temple on the east bank of the Nile River, Egypt.  The obelisk arrived in France in May 1833 and less than six month later was raised in the presence of Louis Philippe I (1773–1850; King of the French 1830-1848).  The square hadn’t always been a happy place for kings to stand; in 1789 (then known as the Place de Louis XV) it was one of the gathering points for the mobs staging what became the French Revolution and after the storming of the Bastille (of of history’s less dramatic events despite the legends), the square was renamed Place de la Revolution, living up to the name by being the place where Louis XVI (1754–1793; King of France 1774-1792), Marie Antoinette (1755–1793; Queen Consort of France 1774-1792) and a goodly number of others were guillotined.  Things were calmer by 1833 when the obelisk was erected.

The structure was a gift to France by Pasha Mehmet Ali (1769–1849, Ottoman Albanian viceroy and governor of Egypt 1805-1848) and in return Paris sent a large mechanical clock which to this day remains in place in the clock tower of the mosque at the summit of the Citadel of Cairo and of the 28 obelisks, six remain in Egypt with the rest in various displays around the world.  Some 3000 years old, in its original location the Obelisk contributed to scientific history wine in circa 250 BC Greek geographer & astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene (circa 276 BC–circa 195 BC) used the shadow it cast to calculate the circumference of the Earth.  By comparing the shadow at a certain time with one in Alexandria, he concluded that the difference in distance between Alexandria and Aswan was seven degrees and 14 minutes and from this he could work out the Earth’s circumference.

Monolithic drivers

In IT, the term “monolithic driver” was used to refer to a software driver designed to handle multiple hardware components or functionalities within a single, large, and cohesive codebase.  In this it differed from earlier (and later) approaches which were modular or layered, the functionality is split into separate, smaller drivers or modules, each of which handled specific tasks or addressed only certain hardware components.  Monolithic drivers became generally available in the late 1980s, a period when both computer architecture and operating systems were becoming more sophisticated in an attempt to overcome the structural limitations imposed by the earlier designs.  It was in the era many of the fundamental concepts which continue to underpin modern systems were conceived although the general adoption of some lay a decade or more away.

During the 1970s & 1980s, many systems were built with a tight integration between software and hardware and some operating systems (OS) were really little more than “file loaders” with a few “add-ons”, and the limitations imposed were “worked-around” by some programmers who more-or-less ignored the operating system an address the hardware directly using “assemblers” (a flavor of “machine-code”).  That approach made for fast software but at the cost of interoperability and compatibility, such creations hardware specific rather using an OS as what came to be known as the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) but at the time, few OSs were like UNIX with its monolithic kernel in which the core OS services (file system management, device drivers etc.) were all integrated into a single large codebase.  As the market expanded, it was obvious the multi-fork approach was commercially unattractive except for the odd niche.

After its release in 1981, use of the IBM personal computers (PC) proliferated and because of its open (licence-free) architecture, an ecosystem of third party suppliers arose, producing a remarkable array of devices which either “hung-off” or “plugged-in” a PC; the need for hardware drivers grew.  Most drivers at the time came from the hardware manufacturers themselves and typically were monolithic (though not yet usually described as such) and written usually for specific hardware and issues were rife, a change to an OS or even other (apparently unrelated) hardware or software sometimes inducing instability or worse.  As operating systems evolved to support more modularity, the term “monolithic driver” came into use to distinguish these large, single-block drivers from the more modular or layered approaches that were beginning to emerge.

It was the dominance of Novell’s Netware (1983-2009) on PC networks which compelled Microsoft to develop Windows NT (“New Technology”, 1993) and it featured a modular kernel architecture, something which made the distinction between monolithic and modular drivers better understood and as developers increasingly embraced the modular, layered approach which better handled maintainability and scalability.  Once neutral, the term “monolithic driver” became something of a slur in IT circles, notably among system administrators (“sysadmins” or “syscons”, the latter based on the “system console”, the terminal on a mainframe hard-wired to the central processor) who accepted ongoing failures of this and that as inherent to the business but wanted to avoid a SPoFs (Single Point of Failure).

In political science, the term “monolithic” is used to describe a system, organization, or entity perceived as being unified, indivisible, and operating with a high degree of internal uniformity, often with centralized control. When something is labeled as monolithic, it implies that it lacks diversity or internal differentiation and presents a singular, rigid structure or ideology.  Tellingly, the most common use of the term is probably when analyzing electoral behavior and demonstrating how groups, societies or sub-sets of either. Although often depicted in the media as “monolithic” in their views, voting patterns or political behavior are anything but and there’s usually some diversity.  In political science, such divergences within defined groups are known as “cross-cutting cleavages”.

It’s used also of political systems in which a regime is structured (or run) with power is highly concentrated, typically in a single dictator or ruling party.  In such systems, usually there is little effective opposition and dissent is suppressed (although some of the more subtle informally tolerate a number of “approved dissenters” who operated within understood limits of self-censorship.  The old Soviet Union (the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) 1922-1991), the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979-), the Republic of China (run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (1949-) and the DPRK (Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea) 1948-) are classic examples of monolithic systems; while the differences between them were innumerable, structurally all were (or are) politically monolithic.  The word is used also as a critique in the social sciences, Time magazine in April 2014 writing of the treatment of “Africa” as a construct in Mean Girls (2004):  “Like the original Ulysses, Cady is recently returned from her own series of adventures in Africa, where her parents worked as research zoologists. It is this prior “region of supernatural wonder” that offers the basis for the mythological reading of the film. While the notion of the African continent as a place of magic is a dated, rather offensive trope, the film firmly establishes this impression among the students at North Shore High School. To them, Africa is a monolithic place about which they know almost nothing. In their first encounter, Karen inquires of Cady: “So, if you’re from Africa, why are you white?” Shortly thereafter, Regina warns Aaron that Cady plans to “do some kind of African voodoo” on a used Kleenex of his to make him like her—in fact, the very boon that Cady will come to bestow under the monomyth mode.”  It remains a sensitive issue and one of the consequences of European colonial practices on the African continent (something which included what would now be regarded as "crimes against humanity) so the casual use of "Africa" as a monolithic construct is proscribed in a way a similar of "Europe" would not attract criticism.    

The limitations of the utility of the term mean it should be treated with caution and while there are “monolithic” aspects or features to constructs such as “the Third World”, “the West” or “the Global South”, the label does over-simplify the diversity of cultures, political systems, and ideologies within these broad categories.  Even something which is to some degree “structurally monolithic” like the United States (US) or the European Union (EU) can be highly diverse in terms of actual behavior.  In the West (and the modern-day US is the most discussed example), the recent trend towards polarization of views has become a popular topic of study and the coalesced factions are sometimes treated as “monolithic” despite in many cases being themselves intrinsically factionalized.