Word: decorum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ancient English axiom. However, it is woman who makyth manners, a behavioral frontier that has traditionally been too sensitive to be guarded by men. From Chaucer's Wife of Bath through Godey's Lady's Book, Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt and Letitia Baldrige, the doyennes of decorum have defined and refined social norms to the point at which a boilermaker in Metropolis, Ill., knows (from his wife) that it is O.K. to eat bacon with his fingers, while french fries should be conveyed by a fork...
...says was written only at the insistence of his publisher, the author hurriedly speaks of old agonies, the balm of forgetfulness, and of his conviction that all wars are futile and immoral. There is even the ritual reference to what Wilfred Owen called the old Lie: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori"- how sweet and beautiful it is to die for one's country...
Constitutionally protected grossness-edible underwear, the vibrators in the drugstore window, massage parlors, sex merchandised in its pervasive richness-has spread the pornographic spirit widely. The Twelfth Night Masque, the oldest private subscription ball in Chicago and hitherto a bastion of Midwestern decorum, has suffered a recent rash of crudity. Last year some guests showed up at the ball dressed as hemorrhoids when President Carter was so afflicted; two years before, when the masque theme was "The Father of Our Country," a number of Lake Shore socialites appeared as penises or sperm. No one proposes calling out a SWAT team...
Still, it is possible that the '80s are going to demand some virtues unknown in the '60s and '70s-self-control, selfdiscipline, stoicism, decorum, even inhibition and a little puritanism. It may be time for a touch of reticence. Coercion cannot produce such attitudes, but the mood of the time may. Americans may find themselves agreeing in some paraphrase of Elihu Root when he walked through a squalid Siberian village as Woodrow Wilson's emissary in the first Soviet revolutionary dawn. "I'm a firm his in democracy," he said, as he skeptically eyed...