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Museum goers might be stumped for a minute by an old-fashioned word in the title of a new show, “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture,” opening Friday at the National Portrait Gallery.

Ballyhoo?

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used it in a sentence and wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Here, for the uninformed is a definition, by way of a few of its synonyms: advertising, promotion, marketing, propaganda, push, puffery, buildup, boosting, fuss, excitement, informal hype, spiel, hullabaloo, splash. Packs some punch, doesn’t it?

Wendy Wick Reaves, the show’s curator says it has its origin in 19th-century circus rhetoric, “flamboyant hucksterism” (hmm, hucksterism, use that word in your next text message). Still not sure, though, I keyed the word into ProQuest, my favorite online database of old newspapers. Scribe Henry E. Dixey of The Chicago Daily Tribune reached across the decades and clued me in. His 1909 treatise follows:

It was the custom of dime museum proprietors to station in front of the ‘palatial palaces of public pleasure’ a leather lunged person who lied in a loud voice about the museum’s attractions, seeking to induce the passers-by to purchase tickets for the extraordinary exhibition within. This man’s speech was called a “ballyhoo.” The species is not yet extinct—he stands in front of animal shows, merry-go-rounds, loop-the-loops, midget cities, dime museums, and other art centers, with a small cane, a big black cigar, stripped clothes and a brassy voice, guffawing the glory of his wares to the chin-whiskered public who ’stop! pause! and consider!’ the ferocious falsehoods with which he beguiles them.  

So, ballyhoo, or promotion, became the stuff of posters—graphic works used in advertising and marketing, wartime propaganda, presidential campaigns, protest movements and film and music promotion. Check out the ballyhoo in a poster about Thomas Edison’s phonograph. “It Talks! It Sings! It Laughs! It Plays Cornet Songs.”

The museum’s show emphasizes the portraits—of Buffalo Bill Cody, Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo, even Johnny Depp—in 60 posters from its collection. It’s a graphic feast. Huge, boisterous type sprawls across exhibition walls. Curator Reaves says the poster aesthetic is “fun, vivid.”

And that ain’t no ballyhoo.

(Photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery: Thomas Alva Edison by Alfred S. Seer Engraver; Copy after: Mathew B. Brady, Color woodcut poster, c. 1878.)

Lectures offered around the Smithsonian tend to bear titles that range from the curiously vague (“Children at Play: An American History”) to the esoterically detailed (“Topics in Museum Conservation Lecture: Hygric Swelling of Stone”). So when a talk came up on “Protective Ornaments: Dressed for Defense” my editor sent me the details, with her own comic, free association:

 “She narrowly escaped harm, when the bullet bounced off her 14-carat diamond.”

With that in mind, I headed over to the lecture, with visions of fiercely militarized gemstones mounted in sharply pronged settings already occupying my thoughts.  And I wasn’t disappointed. Suzanne Ramljak, an art historian and editor of Metalsmith magazine took to a podium at Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery.

Was she suggesting, I wondered, that some latent warrior girl lurks within us when a woman utters the words: “I would just die for that necklace,” or “I can’t live without those earrings”?  Jewelry is not usually considered a life or death matter, she said.

But delving into a photographic survey of historical protective ornaments–think armament like chain mail, helmets, and brass knuckles–spanning from the Stone Age to present day, it was clear that a case could be made that medieval protective gear could be considered a long lost cousin of today’s glitz.  “Not just as accessories, but necessities,” she said.

Early stone necklaces, bracelets and anklets apparently served as a line of defense against animals, prone to attacking appendages. Jewelry adorned with claws and teeth and ornate helmets depicting the heads of ferocious creatures were donned so that their wearers inherited bestial characteristics. Today, people can be found safeguarding themselves with spiritual or superstitious charms like St. Christopher medals and four-leaf clovers.

Ramljak even noted some extreme examples of of “jewelry”–the ankle bracelet-cum-honing-device Martha Stewart wore when under house arrest and a locket designed to hold a potassium iodide pill to be taken in the case of nuclear disaster. 

Check out the defensive and protective possibilities of the jewelry shown in the exhibition, “Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Drutt Collection,” on view at the Renwick Gallery through July 6.

(Photographs courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery.  Esther Knobel, Israeli, born Poland, 1949, “Warrior (Macabi) Brooch,” 1984, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Helen Williams Drutt Collection, © Esther Knobel. Claus Bury, German, born 1946, ”Ring,” 1970, White and yellow gold, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Helen Williams Drutt Collection, © Claus Bury.)