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Decorum was a principle of classical rhetoric, which defined 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 any other literary form, usually expressed words or phrases that were not current in ordinary conversation, characterized as poetic diction.

The use of this word in this sense is of the sixteenth-century,^[1] prescribing the boundaries established in drama and literature, used by Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570) and echoed in Malvolio's tirade in Twelfth Night, "My masters, are you mad, or what are you? Have you no wit, manners nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night?...Is there no respect of persons, place nor time in you?"^[2]

The precepts of social decorum as we understand them, of the preservation of external decency, were consciously set by Lord Chesterfield, who was looking for a translation of les moeurs: "Manners are too little, morals are too much."^[3] If Stanhope divorced decorum from ethics, the place of decorum in the courtroom, of the type of argument that is within bounds, remains pertinent:^[4] the decorum of argument was a constant topic during the O.J. Simpson trial, to pick an egregious example that remains in the public consciousness.

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 Chesterfield's severely reduced form as an element of etiquette: the prescribed limits of appropriate behavior within a set situation.

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