Aureation is a device in arts of rhetoric that involves the "gilding" of diction in one language by the introduction of terms from another, typically a classical language considered to be more prestigious. It can be seen as analogous to gothic schools of ornamentation in carving, painting or ceremonial armoury. In terms of prosody it stands in direct contrast to plain language and its use is sometimes regarded, by current standards of literary taste, as overblown and exaggerated. But aureated expression does not necessarily mean loss of precision or authenticity in poetry when handled by good practitioners. In the British Isles, aureation has often been most associated with Scottish renaissance makars, especially William Dunbar or Gavin Douglas, who commonly drew on the rhetoric and diction of classical antiquity in their work. In the context of language development, aureation can be seen as an extension of processes in which historically vernacular languages are expanded through loan words. In Europe this usually meant borrowings from Latin and Greek. The medieval and renaissance periods were a fertile time for such borrowings and in Germanic languages, such as English and Scots, Greek and Latinate coinages were particularly highlighted, though this has sometimes been decried as pretentious, these coinages being criticized as inkhorn terms. After Europe's colonial erawidened the orbits of cultural contact, aureation could in theory draw on other ancient languages such as Sanskrit. While many classically derived loanwords become useful new terms in the host language, some more mannered or polysyllabic aureations may tend to remain experimental and decorative curiosities. Words such as conservartix, pawsacioun, or vinarye envermaildy are examples in Scots. Aureation commonly involves other mannered rhetorical features in diction; for example circumlocution, which bears a relation to more native literary devices such as the kenning.
Example
An example of considered diction with an aureate inflection occurs in the Scots couplet Matutyne, depurit and cristallyne are aureate words. Aureate diction occurs in the noun phrasegolden candle , a circumlocution which stands for sun. The couplet can thus be translated as: up rose the sun with clear pure crystal light. Dunbar himself uses the term later in the same poem in a passage that employs the limits to expression topos. It occurs as part of a dream vision in which the makar is describing the army of goddesses he has witnessed alighting upon the earth: I would describe, but who could satisfactorily frame in verse the way in which all the fields were radiantly adorned by those white liliesthat shone upwards into the sky? Not you, Homer, sublime as you were in writing, for all your faultlessly ornate diction; nor you, Cicero, whose sweet lips were so consistently lucid in rhetoric: your aureate tongues bothwere not adequate to describe that vision in full.
