decorum
/dɪˈkɔːrəm
/noun [mass noun]
1Behaviour in keeping with good taste and propriety: he had acted with the utmost decorum...
- Of course, if you conduct yourself with impeccable taste and decorum, you will soon bore the reporters, and they will stop covering you.
- ‘They are patterns of behaviour or patterns of decorum that we all have,’ says MacArthur.
- There was a certain lack of decorum and taste at the Daily Record last week.
Synonyms
propriety, properness, seemliness, decency, decorousness, good taste, correctness, appropriateness, appropriacy;
politeness, courtesy, good manners;
refinement, breeding, deportment, dignity, respectability, modesty, demureness
1.1Etiquette: he had no idea of funeral decorum...
- He said, ‘In golf, customs of etiquette and decorum are just as important as rules governing play.’
- On the trek across the Sahara it was vital that decorum, etiquette and social graces were left at the airport!
- You don't have to follow the rules of social decorum or the niceties of society because you are privileged.
Synonyms
etiquette, protocol, customary behaviour, good form, custom, convention, conformity, conventionality, usage, ritual;
formalities, niceties, punctilios, politeness;
French politesse
informal the thing to do
humorous couth
1.2 (decorums) archaic Particular requirements of good taste and propriety.Eighteenth-century novelists, such as William Goodall in his Adventures of Captain Greenland, frequently invoked Shakespeare as a precursor because he was felt to break literary decorums in much the same way as did the new form....
- In this, the volume is representative of current scholarship generally - and with some reason: the earlier decades are certainly less overtly sexy than the later, and more shrouded by those fabled Victorian decorums.
- There is a parallel here with sensation fiction, another literary vogue of the 1860s and 1870s, in which criminality lurks beneath the surface decorums of daily life.
1.3 archaic Suitability to the requirements of a person, rank, or occasion.Since Nabokov showed no sign of responding, one of the witnesses "and he was echt deutsch, real German" tried to hint at the required decorum.
Origin
Mid 16th century (as a literary term, denoting suitability of style): from Latin, neuter of the adjective decorus 'seemly'.