Embellish

Embellish (pronounced m-bell-lysh)

(1) To decorate, garnish, bedeck or embroider an object.

(2) To beautify by ornamentation; to adorn.

(3) To enhance a statement or narrative with fictitious additions.

1300–1350: From the Middle English embelisshen from the Anglo-French, from the Middle French embeliss- (stem of embelir), the construct being em- (The form taken by en- before the labial consonants “b” & “p”, as it assimilates place of articulation).  The en- prefix was from the Middle English en- & in-.  In the Old French it existed as en- & an-, from the Latin in- (in, into); it was also from an alteration of in-, from the Middle English in-, from the Old English in- (in, into), from the Proto-Germanic in (in).  Both the Latin and Germanic forms were from the primitive Indo-European en (in, into) and the frequency of use in the Old French is because of the confluence with the Frankish an- intensive prefix, related to the Old English on-.) + bel-, from the Latin bellus (pretty) + -ish.  The –ish suffix was from the Middle English –ish & -isch, from the Old English –isċ, from the Proto-West Germanic -isk, from the Proto-Germanic –iskaz, from the primitive Indo-European -iskos.  It was cognate with the Dutch -s; the German -isch (from which Dutch gained -isch), the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish -isk & -sk, the Lithuanian –iškas, the Russian -ский (-skij) and the Ancient Greek diminutive suffix -ίσκος (-ískos); a doublet of -esque and -ski.  There exists a welter of synonyms and companion phrases such as decorate, grace, prettify, bedeck, dress up, exaggerate, gild, overstate, festoon, embroider, adorn, spiff up, trim, magnify, deck, color, enrich, elaborate, ornament, beautify, enhance, array & garnish.  Embellish is a verb, embellishing is a noun & verb, embellished is a verb & adjective and embellisher & embellishment are nouns; the noun plural is embellishments.

The meaning "dress up (a narration) with fictitious matter" was first noted in the mid-fifteenth century and was an acknowledgement of a long (if sometimes hardly noble) literary tradition.  It was exemplified by the publication in 1785 by German author Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736-1794) of Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, a collection of extraordinary stories, based (loosely) on the tales told by the real-life Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720-1797).  The real baron was prone to quite some exaggeration in the tales of his travels but never went as far as Herr Raspe had his fictional baron flying to the moon.  The technique of enhancing a statement or narrative with fictitious additions (ie lies) was later perfected by the author and one-time Tory politician Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare (b 1940) and crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947).

Lindsay Lohan in bikini embellished with faux (synthetic) fur, photo-shoot for the fifth anniversary of ODDA magazine, April 2017.

In the matter of Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump

Various matters relating to a payment allegedly made by (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) to adult film star (and director in the same genre) Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Gregory Clifford; b 1979) are currently before a New York criminal court.  When a member of Mr Trump’s legal team suggested she may have a  “propensity to embellish” when giving evidence, counsel was using the word “embellish” in the crooked Hillary sense of “lie”.  Lawyers have many ways to suggest those being cross-examined are lying and embellish is one of the more euphemistic though not as inventive as “economical with the truth”.  That one will forever be associated with former UK cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong (1927-2020; later Baron Armstrong of Ilminster) who, under cross-examination in the “Spycatcher” trial (1986), when referring to a letter, answered: “It contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth.”  Whether the old Etonian was aware of much post-Classical writing isn’t known (at Christ Church, Oxford he read the “Greats” (the history and philosophy of Ancient Greece & Rome)) but he may have been acquainted with Mark Twain’s (1835-1910) Following the Equator (1897) in which appeared: “Truth is the most valuable thing we have.  Let us economize it.” or the earlier thoughts of the Anglo-Irish Whig politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797) who in his Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory (1796) noted: “Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.”  Just as likely however is that Sir Robert had been corrupted by his long service in HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) and was thinking of: “The truth is so precious, it deserves an escort of lies.”, a phrase often attributed (as are many) to Sir Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955), but there’s some evidence to suggest he may have picked it up from comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) and even if it wasn’t something the old seminarian coined, it was the mantra by which he lived so he deserves some credit.  Sir Robert’s phrase entered the annals of legal folklore and was good enough to have been lifted from a script from the BBC satire Yes Minister.

Courtroom sketch of defendant, judge, prosecutor & witness by Jane Rosenberg (b 1949), Manhattan Criminal Court, New York, 7 May 2024.

The work of courtroom sketch artists became a feature of the trial process in many Western courts during the years when photography was banned and Ms Rosenberg has since 1980 become of of the most highly regarded practitioners.  Of her art, she was quoted, in a statement she stressed was non-political and not a comment on the legal merit of his case, that Mr Trump was “fun to draw”.  Something of the character of law will be lost if the courtroom sketch artist is replaced by an artificial intelligence (AI) bot.

The exchange on 7 May wasn’t the first time “propensity” and “embellish” had been entered into the trial transcript.   On 23 April, the court heard about former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s (b 1951) “secret arrangement” negotiated in 2015 with Mr Trump and his then attorney (and “fixer”) Michael Cohen (b 1966), the terms of which included the publication (1) promoting Mr Trump’s presidential ambition and (2) publicizing Mr Cohen’s “research” relating to Mr Trump’s opponents: “He would send me information [about the others seeking the Republican nomination for the 2016 presidential election] and that was the basis for our story, and we would embellish (in the National Enquirer tradition "embellish" is a spectrum word ranging in meaning from "exaggerate" to "untrue").” Mr Pecker testified, adding the arrangement was kept secret from all but a handful of his senior executives: “I told them [the National Enquirer’s East and West Coast bureau chiefs] we were going to try and help the campaign, and to do that we would keep it as quiet as possible.”  National Enquirer has bureaux; who knew?

Stormy Daniels.

The day before, Mr Trump’s team pursued a line of questioning designed to cast doubt on Mr Cohen’s credibility, suggesting that for him Mr Trump has become “an obsession” and that he wishes to see him incarcerated and has “a propensity to lie.”  “He has a goal, an obsession, with getting Trump.  I submit to you he cannot be trusted.  His entire financial livelihood depends on President Trump’s destruction… You cannot make a serious decision about President Trump by relying on the words of Michael Cohen.” Counsel argued.  Mr Cohen had certainly left no doubt the case was on his mind, the previous night posting on-line that he’d experienced some “…mental excitement about this trial...” and the testimony he would deliver.

The highlight thus far however came when the state called to the stand Ms Daniels where in greater detail than expected she described the encounter with Mr Trump which led to the hush-money scheme.  The word the press seemed to settle on for their reports was “salacious” but the two things which most struck legal analysts was (1) the unusually wide interpretative latitude the judge appeared to allow himself when deciding the nature of the many details Ms Daniels should be allowed to introduce and (2) the curious reticence of defence counsel in objecting to the course things were taking.  Both of these aspects may be considered if the case goes on appeal when often a ruling is made on what evidence is relevant and what is so prejudicial that under the evidentiary rule it shouldn’t have been admitted and heard by the jury.

Stormy expression: Donald Trump at the defense table, Manhattan Criminal Court, New York, 7 May 2024.

Over lunch, Mr Trump’s team must have discussed these matters because they moved a motion requesting the judge declare a mistrial on the grounds Ms Daniels’ testimony contained prejudicial and irrelevant comments which: “…aside from pure embarrassment…,” these details did nothing but “…inflame the jury.”  The judge did acknowledge Ms Daniels was a difficult witness to control and agreed: “...it would have been better if some of these things had been left unsaid.” but denied the motion, saying defense counsel should have raised more objections during the testimony and that cross-examination would permit them to redress things, adding that at one point he had intervened to limit her statements simply because the defence had not.  The defense did actually raise a number of objections, a slew of which the judge upheld, after which he cautioned the witness: “Just listen to the question, and answer the question.”  Some may have recalled the infamous cross-examination of Hermann Göring (1893–1946; leading Nazi 1922-1945, Hitler's designated successor & Reichsmarschall 1940-1945) by Justice Robert Jackson (1892–1954; US Supreme Court Justice 1941-1954; Chief US Prosecutor at the Nuremberg (IMT) trials of Nazi war criminals 1945-1946) at the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) when the judges of the IMT (International Military Tribunal) declined to “control the witness”, leaving Justice Jackson increasingly exasperated by Göring’s long answers which the prosecutor though mostly irrelevant but which were of great interest to at least some of the judges and permitted under the terms of the court’s charter.  Of course, the IMT wasn’t limited by New York’s rules on admissibility of evidence.

Stormy Daniels (2019) by Robert Crumb.  Robert Crumb (b 1943) is an US cartoonist, associated since the 1960s with the counter-culture and some strains of libertarianism; he was one of the most identifiable figures of the quasi-underground (in the Western rather than the Warsaw Pact sense) comix movement.

However, in one exchange during defense cross examination, there was no question of any propensity to embellish, counsel asking: “Am I correct in that you hate President Trump?” to which Ms Daniels replied: “Yes.”  No ambiguity there and although not discussed in court, her attitude may not wholly be unrelated to Mr Trump’s rather ungracious description of her as “horse face”.  Really, President Trump should be more respectful towards a three-time winner of F.A.M.E.'s (Fans of Adult Media and Entertainment) much coveted annual "Favorite Breasts" award.

Donald Trump leaving Manhattan Criminal Court, New York, 7 May 2024.

Speaking briefly to reporters after leaving the court, Mr Trump said: “This was a very big day, a very revealing day, as you see, their case is totally falling apart, they have nothing on the books and records and even something that should bear very little relationship to the case, it's just a disaster for the DA.”

Limn

Limn (pronounced lim)

(1) To represent in drawing or painting; to delineate (rare except as literary device and also used figuratively).

(2) To portray in words; to describe (rare except as literary device).

(3) To illuminate (in the archaic sense) manuscripts; to decorate with gold or some other bright colour (obsolete except in historic references)

1400–1450: From the late Middle English limnen, limyne, lymm, lymn & lymne (to illuminate (a manuscript)), a variant of the Middle English luminen (to illuminate (a manuscript)), a short-form variant of enluminen or enlumine (to shed light upon, illuminate; to enlighten; to make bright or clear; to give colour to; to illuminate (a manuscript); to depict, describe; to adorn or embellish with figures of speech or poetry; to make famous, glorious, or illustrious), from the Old & Middle French enluminer (to illumine (a manuscript)), from the Latin illūminō (to brighten, light up; to adorn; to make conspicuous), the construct being il- (a variant of in- (the prefix used in the sense of “in, inside”)) + lūminō (to brighten, illuminate; to reveal), the construct being from lūmen (genitive luminis) (radiant energy; light; (and used poetically) brightness”) (from the primitive Indo-European lewk- (bright; to shine; to see)) + -ō (the suffix forming regular first-conjugation verbs).  The more familiar derived form in Latin was inlūmināre (to embellish; to brighten (literally “light up”), related obviously to related to lucere (to shine), the idea identifiable in the Modern English lustre.

Limn’s figurative sense of “portray, depict” which persists in literary and poetic use (some journalists also like the archaic flourish) was in use by the 1590s.  The derived forms include the verbs dislimn, dislimns, dislimning & dislimned (to remove the outlines of; to efface); enlimn enlimns, enlimning & enlimned) (to adorn (a book, manuscript etc) by illuminating or ornamenting with coloured and decorated letters and figures, the adjective unlimned (not limned or depicted), outlimn (to sketch out or delineate) and the noun limner (plural limners) (one who limns or portrays.  The use of limning as a noun described a depiction (the definitional boundaries of which shifted over the centuries).  The spelling limne was (obsolete) by the seventeenth century.  Limn & limned are verbs, limner is a noun & limming is a noun & verb; the two nouns plural are limners & limnings.

Two limnings in miniature from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. 

In the popular imagination, the illuminate manuscript is one where the art has a quality of vibrancy, the colors vivid, typified by Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry) (1413-1416) by Dutch miniature painters, the brothers Herman, Paul, and Jean de Limbourg from the city of Nijmegen.  The volume is now in the collections of the Musée Condé in the Château de Chantilly, Chantilly, France.  January (left) and September (right) were two of a number of illustrations in a seasonal theme and as well as of interest to historians of art, the depictions have been used as documentary evidence of aspects of lifestyle as varied as the place of animals in society to the colors of garments.  In the tradition of the International Gothic of fourteenth & fifteenth centuries (the successor epoch to the High Gothic) the book is noted for its detail, refinement and use of gold leaf though quite how reliable as a historic record such documents are has been questioned; while not exactly the Instagram of the age, they were certainly idealized and produced for whomever it was prepared to pay for the commission.

Limnophile Lindsay Lohan lingers to look with longing at a lake's languid waters, Georgia Rule (2007).

Limno- is a word-forming element used in science in the sense of “of or pertaining to lakes and fresh water; the study of bodies of fresh water” and dates from 1892 when the name for the discipline appeared in scientific papers, the first to use the term apparently the Swiss geologist François-Alphonse Forel (1841-1912).  The related forms are limnological, limnetic, limnophile (there seem not to be any limnophobes), limnologist and the marvellous adjective limnophilous (loving or having an affinity towards lakes).  The noun limnology does not describe the study of illuminated manuscripts and despite the spelling is unrelated, the construct being limno-, from the Ancient Greek λίμνη (límnē) (pool of standing water, tidal pool, pond, marsh, lake," a word of uncertain origin but perhaps connected to the Latin limus (mud), from the primitive Indo-European root slei & lei- (slime), via the notion of “moistness, standing water), from or closely related to λιμήν (limḗn) (harbor) & λειμών (leimṓn) (moist place, meadow) +‎ -(o)logy.  The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism etc).

Two folio pages from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. 

Intriguingly different from most in the genre is the Black Hours Manuscript (known also as the Morgan Black Hours), created between 1460-1480 (some sources claim the final artwork was completed by 1475) in Bruges in what is now the Flemish Region of Belgium.  Created probably for a patron or member of the Burgundian Court, it’s now held in Manhattan’s Morgan Library and Museum.  What is most striking about the Black Hours is the extensive use of dark blueish hues as the predominant background shading.  Highly unusual in any artistic form in this era, the color occurs because of the extremely corrosive process used to dye the vellum with iron gall ink.  The black pages are a rarity (and at the time an expensive one) and the miniatures all use tones, the palette throughout very limited and restricted to blue, old rose, green, gray and white, with a few touches of gold, a radical departure from the usual splashes of yellow and scarlet, the margins decorated with blue borders, gold acanthus leaves and the expected drolleries.  So distinctive are the stylistic elements that historians of art continue to debate the influences on the creators and traces of its motifs appear often in modern graphic art.

Rimbellisher

Rimbellisher (pronounced rhim-bell-lysh)

A decorative ring attached to the rim of a car's wheel.

1940s: A portmanteau word, the construct being rim +‎ (em)bellish +-er and originally a trademarked brand of the Ace company.  Rim was from the tenth century Middle English rim, rym & rime, from the Old English rima (rim, edge, border, bank, coast), from the Proto-Germanic rimô & rembô (edge, border), from the primitive Indo-European rem- & remə- (to rest, support, be based).   It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian Rim (plank, wooden cross, trellis), the Old Saxon rimi (edge; border; trim) and the Old Norse rimi (raised strip of land, ridge).  Rim generally means “an edge around something, especially when circular” and is used in fields a different as engineering and vulcanology.  The use in political geography is an extension of the idea, something like “PacRim” (Pac(ific) + rim) used to group the nations with coastlines along the Pacific Ocean.  The use in print journalism referred to “a semicircular copydesk”.   The special use in metallurgy described the outer layer of metal in an ingot where the composition was different from that of the centre.  The word rim is an especially frustrating one for golfers to hear because it describes the ball rolling around the rim of the hole but declining to go in.

Embellish dates from the early fourteenth century and was from the Middle English embelisshen from the Anglo-French, from the Middle French embeliss- (stem of embelir), the construct being em- (The form taken by en- before the labial consonants “b” & “p”, as it assimilates place of articulation).  The en- prefix was from the Middle English en- & in-.  In the Old French it existed as en- & an-, from the Latin in- (in, into); it was also from an alteration of in-, from the Middle English in-, from the Old English in- (in, into), from the Proto-Germanic in (in).  Both the Latin and Germanic forms were from the primitive Indo-European en (in, into) and the frequency of use in the Old French is because of the confluence with the Frankish an- intensive prefix, related to the Old English on-.) + bel-, from the Latin bellus (pretty) + -ish.  The –ish suffix was from the Middle English –ish & -isch, from the Old English –isċ, from the Proto-West Germanic -isk, from the Proto-Germanic –iskaz, from the primitive Indo-European -iskos.  It was cognate with the Dutch -s; the German -isch (from which Dutch gained -isch), the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish -isk & -sk, the Lithuanian –iškas, the Russian -ский (-skij) and the Ancient Greek diminutive suffix -ίσκος (-ískos); a doublet of -esque and -ski.  There exists a welter of synonyms and companion phrases such as decorate, grace, prettify, bedeck, dress up, exaggerate, gild, overstate, festoon, embroider, adorn, spiff up, trim, magnify, deck, color, enrich, elaborate, ornament, beautify, enhance, array & garnish.  Embellish is a verb, embellishing is a noun & verb, embellished is a verb & adjective and embellisher & embellishment are nouns; the noun plural is embellishments.

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.  Rimbellisher is a noun and the noun plural is rimbellishers.  All other forms are non-standard but a wheel to which a rimbellisher has been fitted could be said to be rimbellished (adjective) white the person doing the fitting would be a rimbellisher (noun), the process an act of rimbellishing (verb) and the result a rimbellishment (noun).

Jaguar XK120 with wire wheels (left), with hubcaps (centre) and with hubcaps and rimbellishers (right).

The Jaguar XK range (1948-1961) was available either with solid or wire wheels and while the choice was usually on aesthetic grounds, those using the things in competition sometimes had to assess the trade-offs.  The wire wheels were lighter and provided better cooling of the brakes (especially those connected to the rear wheels which were covered with fender skirts (spats) when the steel wheels were fitted.  In many forms of motor sport that was of course a great advantage but the spokes and the deletion of the skirts came at an aerodynamic cost, the additional drag induced by the combination reducing top speed by a up to 5 mph (8 km/h) and increasing fuel consumption.  It was thus a question of working out what was most valued and in the early days, where regulations permitted, some drivers used wire-wheels at the front and retained the skirts at the rear, attempting to get as much as possible of the best of both worlds (the protrusion of the hubs used on the wire wheels precluded them from fitting behind the skirts).  Jaguar XK owners would never refer to their wheels as “rims” although there may be some who have added “rims” to their modern (post Tata ownership) Jaguars.

Hofit Golan (b 1985) and Lindsay Lohan (b 1986) attending Summer Tour Maserati in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, July 2016.  The Maserati Quattroporte is a 1964 Series I, fitted with steel wheels and rimbellishers.

Among certain classes, it’s now common to refer to wheels as rims, and the flashier the product, the more likely it is to be called a “rim”.  Good taste is of course subjective but as a general rule, the greater the propensity to being described as a rim, the more likely it is to be something in poor taste.  That’s unless it actually is a rim, some wheels being of multi-part construction where the rim is a separate piece (and composed sometimes from a different metal).  In the early days of motoring this was the almost universal method of construction and it persisted in trucks until relatively recently (although still used in heavy, earth-moving equipment and such).  However, those dealing with the high-priced, multi-pieced wheels seem still to call them wheels and use the term “rim” only when discussing the actual rim component.

1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III four-door cabriolet with coachwork by German house Voll Ruhrbeck, fitted with the standard factory wire wheels (left) and 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III fixed head coupé (FHC) with coachwork by Belgium house Vesters et Neirinck, fitted with the “Ace Deluxe” wheel discs which fitted over the standard factory wire wheels (right).  The coupé, fabricated in Brussels, was unusual in pre-war coachbuilding in that there was no B-pillar, the style which would become popular in the US between the 1950s-1970s where in two & four-door form it would be described as a “hardtop”, the nomenclature which would over the years be sometimes confused with the “hard-tops” sometime supplied with convertibles as a more secure alternative to the usual “soft top”.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first known instance of rimbellisher in print was in The Motor (1903-1988) magazine in 1949 although they seem first to have been so-described when on sale in England in 1948.  The rimbellishers were a new product for the Ace Company which in the 1930s had specialized in producing disk-like covers for wire-wheels.  That might seem strange because wire wheels are now much admired but in the 1930s many regarded them as old-fashioned although their light-weight construction meant they were often still used.  What Ace’s aluminium covers provided was the advantage of the lighter weight combined with a shiny, modernist look and they were also easy to keep clean, unlike wire wheels which could demand hours each month to maintain.

The Ace company's publicity material from the 1950s.

In the post-war years the rimbellishers became popular because they were a detail which added a “finished” look.  They were a chromed ring which attached inside the rim of the wheel, providing a contrasting band between the tyre and the centre of the wheel, partially covered usually by a hubcap.  Ace’s original Rimbellishers were secured using a worm-drive type of fastening which ensured the metal of the wheel suffered no damage but as other manufacturers entered the market, the trend became to use a cheaper method of construction using nothing more than multiple sprung tags and with the devices push-fitted into the well of the wheel, some scraping of the paint being inevitable.  Rimbellisher (always with an initial capital) was a registered trademark of the Ace company but the word quickly became generic and was in the 1950s & 1960s used to describe any similar device.  Interestingly, by the mid 1950s, Ace ceased to use “rimbellisher” in its advertising copy and described the two ranges as “wheel discs” and “wheel trims”.

The early versions did nothing more than produce a visual effect but the stylists couldn’t resist the opportunities and some rimbellishers grew to the extent they completely blocked the flow of air through the vents in the wheels and that adversely affected the cooling of the brakes, the use of some of the new generation of full-wheel covers also having this consequence.  The solution was to ensure there was some airflow but to maintain as much as possible of the visual effect, what were often added were little fins and for these to work properly, they needed to catch the airflow so there were left and right-side versions, an idea used to this day in the alloy wheels of some high-price machinery.

1969 Pontiac GTO with standard trim rings (left) and 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge supplied without trim rings (right).

Ace in the early 1950s had distributers in the US and both their rimbellishers and full-wheel covers were offered.  They took advantage of the design which enabled the same basic units to be used, made specific only the substitution of a centre emblem which was varied to suit different manufacturers.  Ace’s market penetration for domestic vehicles didn’t last because Detroit soon began producing their own and within a short time they were elaborate and often garish, something which would last into the twenty-first century.  The Americans soon forgot about the rimbellisher name and started calling them trim-rings and they became a feature of the steel “sports wheels” manufacturers offered on their high-performance ranges in the years before aluminium wheels became mainstream products.  The trim-rings of course had a manufacturing cost and this was built into the price when the wheels were listed as an option.  The cost of production wouldn’t have been great but interestingly, when General Motors’ Pontiac division developed the “Judge” option for its GTO to compete with the low-cost Plymouth Road Runner, the trim-rings were among the items deleted.  However, the Judge package evolved to the point where it became an extra-cost option for the GTO with the missing trim-rings about the only visible concession to economy.

Mercedes-Benz W111s: 1959 220 SE with 8-slot rimbellishers (left), 1967 250 SE with the briefly used solid rimbellishers (centre) and 1971 280 SE 3.5 with the later 12-slot rimbellishers which lacked the elegance of the 8-slots.

Like many companies, Mercedes-Benz used wheel covers as a class identifier.  When the W111 saloons (1959-1968) were released in 1959, the entry-level 220 was fitted with just hubcaps while the up market twin-carburetor 220 S and the fuel-injected 220 SE had rimbellishers (made by the factory, not Ace).  Within a few years, the use of rimbellishers was expanded but by the mid-1960s, the elegant 8-slot units mostly had been replaced with a less-pleasing solid metal pressing (albeit one which provided a gap for brake cooling).  That didn’t last and phased-in between 1967-1968, the company switched from the hubcap / rimbellisher combination to a one-piece wheel cover which included the emulation of a 12-slot rimbellisher.  There were no objections to the adoption of one-piece construction but few found the new design as attractive as the earlier 8-slot.

MG publicity photograph (left) showing MGA and Magnettes, the former fitted with the Cornercroft's Ace Rimbellishers which were a factory option.  The MGA (right) uses a different third-party rimbellisher which was physically bigger and overlapped the edge of the rim to a greater degree.  The factory-option is preferred by most because it better suits the MGA's delicate lines.

1958 Jaguar 3.4 (top) and 1960 MGA Coupé (bottom) with the relevant Ace-Mercury wheel discs.

As well as an after-market product sold through retail outlets and offered as a dealer-fitted accessory, the Ace-Mercury wheel discs were at various times a factory option, MG sometimes listing them for the MGA (1955-1962), ZA-ZB Magnettes (1953-1958) and early versions of both the MGB (1962-1980) & Midget (1961-1979).  For Coventry-based Cornercroft (manufacturer of the Ace Mercury range), the attraction was the (more or less) standardized shape of steel wheels meant it was possible to use the one basic design in a variety of diameters (13, 14 & 15 inch), able to be marketed for use with vehicles from different makers simply by changing the centre-cap to a fitting with the name of the relevant marque (others would also use the same technique).  Cornercraft also offered a (fake) eared spinner in the style of a knockoff nut but these seem never to have been factory options.  The Ace-Mercury was made from bright anodized aluminium and thus was both lightweight and corrosion-resistant but somewhat fragile if subjected to stresses which steel would easily cope.  Additionally, like many “big” wheel-covers, they could be prone to “popping-off” during hard cornering, a phenomenon familiar to students of the car chases in Hollywood movies between the 1960 and 1990s, the film pedants (of which there seem to be many) documenting instances where the “continuity girl” either failed to notice or ignore a wheel-cover inexplicably re-attached, mid-chase.  All of this meant the survival rate of Ace-Mercury is low and many were anyway discarded as subsequent owners preferred the sexier look of wire, alloy or styled-steel wheels.  That makes them now a valuable period-piece and it’s not unusual to see an MG, Riley or Jaguar driven to a show with bare wheels, the Ace-Mercurys put on only for the duration of the exhibition.

Crornercraft advertisement, 1957.

One difference from the usual practice was that unlike most hub-caps or wheel covers which tended to be the same for all four wheels, the Ace-Mercury’s small louvers operated as air scoops when the wheels were in rotation, ducting cooling air through the ventilation holes in the wheel to assist in cooling the brakes.  A set for four was thus supplied in left & right-hand pairs and needed to be installed with the louvers’ open edge “facing the breeze”.  That wasn’t unique but was untypical and the concept was sometimes made more intricate still, such as when the fourth-generation Chevrolet Corvette (C4, 1983-1996) was introduced with alloy wheels of a different width front & rear, meaning than for the cooling ducts to work there were four different wheels.  Another quirk of the Ace-Mercury was that although the visual similarities make them all barely distinguishable except for the diameter, in January 1959, MG changed the design of the MGA’s disc wheels, competing Cornercroft to re-design to the internal structure (the MGA version’s left/right part numbers changing from 97H675/97H676 to BHA4165/BHA4166.  Details like this litter the car restoration business which is why replicating exactly what was done decades ago can be both challenging and expensive.

1966 Jaguar Mark X with factory rimbellishers.

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”.

Blazon

Blazon (pronounced bley-zuhn)

(1) In heraldry, an escutcheon or coat of arms or a banner depicting a coat of arms.

(2) In heraldry, a description (verbal or written or in an image) of a coat of arms.

(3) In heraldry, a formalized language for describing a coat of arms (the heraldic description of armorial bearings).

(4) An ostentatious display, verbal or otherwise.

(5) A description or recording (especially of the good qualities of a person or thing).

(6) In literature, verses which dwelt upon and described various parts of a woman's body (usually in admiration). 

(7) Conspicuously or publicly to set forth; display; proclaim.

(8) To adorn or embellish, especially brilliantly or showily.

(9) To depict (heraldic arms or the like) in proper form and color.

(10) To describe a coat of arms.

1275-1300: From the late thirteenth century Middle English blazon (armorial bearings, coat of arms), from the twelfth century Old French blason (shield, blazon (also “collar bone”).  Of the words in the Romance languages (the Spanish blason, Italian blasone, Portuguese brasao & Provençal blezo, the first two are said to be French loan-words and the origins of all remain uncertain.  According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), the suggestion by nineteenth century French etymologists of connections with Germanic words related to English blaze is dubious because of the sense disparities.  The verb blazon (to depict or paint (armorial bearings) dates from the mid sixteenth century and was either (or both) from the noun or the French blasonner (from the French noun).  In English, it had earlier in the 1500s been used to mean “descriptively to set forth; descriptively” especially (by at least the 1530s) specifically “to vaunt or boast” and in that sense it was probably at least influenced by the English blaze.  Blazon & blazoning are nouns & verbs, blazoner, blazonry & blazonment are nouns and blazoned & blazonable are adjectives; the noun plural is blazons.

A coat of arms, possibly of dubious provenance. 

The now more familiar verb emblazon (inscribe conspicuously) seems first to have been used around the 1590s in the sense of “extol” and the still common related forms (emblazoning; emblazoned) emerged almost simultaneously.  The construct of emblazon was en- +‎ blazon (from the Old French blason (in its primary sense of “shield”).  The en- prefix was from the Middle English en- (en-, in-), from the Old French en- (also an-), from the Latin in- (in, into).  It was also an alteration of in-, from the Middle English in-, from the Old English in- (in, into), from the Proto-Germanic in (in).  Both the Latin & Germanic forms were from the primitive Indo-European en (in, into).  The intensive use of the Old French en- & an- was due to confluence with Frankish intensive prefix an- which was related to the Old English intensive prefix -on.  It formed a transitive verb whose meaning is to make the attached adjective (1) in, into, (2) on, onto or (3) covered.  It was used also to denote “caused” or as an intensifier.  The prefix em- was (and still is) used before certain consonants, notably the labials “b” & “p”.

Google ngram: It shouldn’t be surprising there seems to have been a decline in the use of “blazon” while “emblazoned” has by comparison, in recent decades, flourished.  That would reflect matters of heraldry declining in significance, their appearance in printed materials correspondingly reduced in volume.  However, because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Self referential emblazoning: Lindsay Lohan's selfie of her modeling a sweater by Ashish, her visage emblazoned in sequins, London, November 2014.

Impressionistically though this assumption is, few would doubt “blazon” is now rare while “emblazoned” is far from uncommon.  While “emblazon” began with the meaning “that which the emblazoner does” (ie (1) to adorn with prominent, (2) to inscribe upon and (3) to draw a coat of arms) it evolved by the mid-nineteenth century with the familiar modern sense of “having left in the mind a vivid impression” (often in the form “emblazoned on one’s memory”).  In English, there’s nothing unusual in a derived or modified form of a word becoming common than its original root, even to the point the where the original is rendered rare, unfamiliar or even obsolete, a phenomenon due to changes in usage patterns, altered conventions in pronunciation or shifts in meaning that make the derived form more practical or culturally resonant.  That’s just how English evolves.

Other examples include (1) ruthless vs. ruth (ruth (pity; compassion) was once a common noun in Middle English but has long been extinct while ruthless, there being many who demand the description, remains popular), (2) unkempt vs kempt (kempt (neatly kept) would have been listed as extinct were it not for it finding a niche as a literary and poetic form and has also been used humorously or ironically), (3) disheveled vs sheveled (sheveled was from the Old French chevelé (having hair) and was part of mainstream vocabulary as late as the eighteenth century but, except in jocular use, is effectively non-existent in modern English) and (4) redolent vs dolent (redolent (evocative of; fragrant) was from dolent (sorrowful), from the Latin dolere (to feel pain)); redolent both outlived and enjoyed a meaning-shift from its root.

Etymologists think of these as part of the linguistic fossil record, noting there’s no single reason for the phenomenon beyond what survives being better adapted to cultural or conversational needs.  In that, these examples differ from the playful fork of back-formation which has produced (1) combobulate (a back-formation from discombobulate (to confuse or disconcert; to throw into a state of confusion) which was a humorous mock-Latin creation in mid-nineteenth century US English) (2) couth (a nineteenth century back-formation from uncouth and used as a humorous form meaning “refined”), (3) gruntled (a twentieth century back-formation meaning “happy or contented; satisfied”, the source being disgruntled (unhappy; malcontented) and most sources indicate it first appeared in print in 1926 but the most celebrated example comes from PG Wodehouse (1881–1975) who in The Code of the Woosters (1938) penned: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”  Long a linguistic joke, some now take gruntled seriously but for the OED remains thus far unmoved and (4) ept (a back-formation from inept (not proficient; incompetent or not competent (there is a functional difference between those two)) which was from the Middle French inepte, from the Latin ineptus).

Literary use

In literary use, “blazon” was a technical term used by the Petrarchists (devotes of Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), a scholar & poet of the early Italian Renaissance renowned for his love poems & sonnets and regarded also as one of the earliest humanists).  Blazon in this context (a subset of what literary theorists call “catalogue verse”) was adopted because, like the structured and defined elements of heraldic symbolism, Petrarch’s poems contained what might be thought an “inventory” of verses which dwelt upon and detailed the various parts of a woman's body; a sort of catalogue of her physical attributes.  Petrarch’s approach wasn’t new because as a convention in lyric poetry it was well-known by the mid thirteenth century, most critics crediting the tradition to the writings of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, a figure about whom little is although it’s believed he was born in Normandy.  In England the Elizabethan sonneteers honed the technique as a devotional device, often, in imaginative ways, describing the bits of their mistresses they found most pleasing, a classic example a fragment from Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), a wedding day ode by the English poet Edmund Spenser (circa 1552-1599) to his bride (Elizabeth Boyle) in 1594:

Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright.
Her forehead ivory white,
Her cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded,
Her lips like cherries charming men to bite,
Her breast like to a bowl of cream uncrudded,
Her paps like lilies budded,
Her snowy neck like to a marble tower,
And all her body like a palace fair.

Two bowls of cream uncrudded.

So objectification of the female form is nothing new and the poets saw little wrong with plagiarism, most of the imagery summoned salvaged from the works of Antiquity by elegiac Roman and Alexandrian Greek poets.  Most relied for their effect on brevity, almost always a single, punchy line and none seem ever to attempt the scale of the “epic simile”.  As can be imagined, the novelty of the revival didn’t last and the lines soon were treated by readers (some of whom were fellow poets) as clichés to be parodied (a class which came to be called “contrablazon”), the London-based courtier Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) borrowing from the Italian poet Francesco Berni (1497–1535) the trick of using terms in the style of Petrarch but “mixing them up”, thus creating an early form of body dysmorphia: Mopsa's forehead being “jacinth-like”, cheeks of “opal”, twinkling eyes “bedeckt with pearl” and lips of “sapphire blue”.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) however saw other possibilities in the blazon and in Sonnet 130 (1609) turned the idea on its head, listing the imperfections in her body parts and characteristics yet concluding, despite all that, he anyway adored her like no other (here rendered in a more accessible English):

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.