Style is a word that people think they understand. Most people
recognize artifacts like buildings and clothes as being exemplars of
particular styles, and they know words like Rococo and Art Deco as names
for styles. They can recognize stylistic similarities not only in one sort
of artifact but also across wide ranges of different things, such as
buildings, furniture, artworks, clothes, music, and even manners. However,
“style” is a slippery notion: the word has been used in a
variety of senses since the ancient Greeks first thought about the
differences in how people wrote or painted, and it is still used to refer
to different things.