'Pleasant-Sounding, Flowing, Musical'

A phrase returned to me unexpectedly and has nagged for several days: “Mellifluous Meliority.” It was the name of a store in the late sixties or early seventies, somewhere in North Central Ohio, possibly in Kent. Perhaps a record store or headshop. I knew it only from a radio commercial on an “underground” station in Cleveland, but the words stuck. I remember the commercial was spoken by a man with a working-class English accent, recalling Stanley Holloway. 

That’s the way memory works, arbitrarily, often frustratingly, like a photograph or musical phrase without context. Mellifluous is an adjective rooted in the Latin for “honey” and “to flow,” and is used figuratively to mean, according to the OED, “of speech, words, music, etc.: sweet, honeyed; pleasant-sounding, flowing, musical.” You’ll find it in Shakespeare and Milton, and Boswell uses it in his Life of Johnson: “We talked of a work much in vogue at that time, written in a very mellifluous style, but which, under pretext of another subject, contained much artful infidelity.”

 

It's March 20, 1776, and Boswell and Johnson are in Oxford discussing Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. Boswell continues on Gibbon, known for the beauty of his prose and his anti-clericalism:

 

“I said it was not fair to attack us so unexpectedly; he should have warned us of our danger, before we entered his garden of flowery eloquence, by advertising ‘Spring-guns and men-traps set here’. The authour had been an Oxonian, and was remembered there for having ‘turned Papist’. I observed, that as he had changed several times - from Church of England to the Church of Rome, -- from the Church of Rome to infidelity, -- I did not despair yet of seeing him a methodist preacher. JOHNSON. (laughing), ‘It is said, that his range has been more extensive, and that he has once been Mahometan. However, now that he has published his infidelity, he will probably persist in it.’”

 

The OED defines the noun meliority as “the quality or condition of being better; superiority.” It also derives from the Latin (melior = “better”). Johnson’s own Dictionary (1755) defines it as “state of being better. A word very elegant, but not used.” The OED agrees and labels the word “obsolete.” Now it’s the name of a skin-care product. A search uncovers no mention of Mellifluous Meliority in the time and place I remember. Does it ring anyone’s bell? Does anyone recall a shop selling the better sort of sweet sounds?