Decorous

WORD OF THE DAY

decorous / adjective / DECK-er-us

Definition
1: marked by propriety and good taste
2: correct

Examples
“Ruth Orkin's most famous picture was staged in Florence. Learning from a young American student how Italian men ogled and catcalled women, Orkin posed her in a picturesque but slightly seedy setting, looking straight ahead with an uncomfortable expression as she passed a gantlet of male bystanders. Taken in 1951, the picture offers a feminist rejoinder to a celebrated Richard Avedon image made four years earlier, of a Dior fashion model standing in Paris's decorous Place de la Concorde, as three appreciative but respectful young men stride by.”
— The New York Times, 19 Nov. 2021

The expression on the face of the resident first cellist, who had every right to expect the gig, is a study in decorous disappointment.
— Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 30 Sep. 2022

Did You Know?
One of the earliest recorded uses of decorous appears in the mid-17th century in a book titled The Rules of Civility (1673): “It is not decorous to look in the Glass, to comb, brush, or do any thing of that nature to ourselves, whilst the said person be in the Room.”
This rule of thumb may be a bit outdated; like many behaviors once deemed unbecoming, public primping is unlikely to offend in modern times. Though mores shift, decorous lives on to describe timeless courtesies like polite speech, proper attire, and (ahem) covering one’s cough.
Decorous for a time had another meaning as well—"fitting or appropriate"—but that now-obsolete sense seems to have existed for only a few decades in the 17th century.
Decorous derives from the Latin word decorus, an adjective created from the noun decor, meaning "beauty" or "grace."
Decor is akin to the Latin verb decēre ("to be fitting"), which is the source of our adjective decent. It is only fitting, then, that decent can be a synonym of decorous.