Decorum
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In classical rhetoric, the principle of decorum controlled what was appropriate to each of the main styles into which Hellenistic and Latin rhetors had divided written literature: the grand style, the middle style and the low (or plain) style. Certain types of vocabulary and diction were considered appropriate for certain stylistic levels. This principle of decorum was an influential concept even in the looser rescripts of Romanticism. Poetry, perhaps more than other types of literary texts, tended to use words or phrases that were not current in ordinary conversation, so-called poetic diction.
Concepts of decorum, increasingly sensed as inhibitive and stultifying, were aggressively attacked and deconstructed by writers of the Modernist movement, with the result that readers' expectations were no longer based on decorum, and in consequence the violations of decorum that underlie the wit of mock-heroic, of literary burlesque, and even a sense of bathos, were dulled in the twentieth-century reader.
The word "decorum" survives in a severely reduced form as an element of etiquette: the prescribed limits of appropriate behavior within a set situation.
[edit] References
- "Language in literature" A first introduction to some basics.
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