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The pinkest classroom in Faye's high school. The most ruffled and doilied. The cleanest, brightest. The most elaborate, with ovens and sewing stations ,refrigerators, banks of saucepan and stockpot.

Source: The Nix

I'm trying to understand the above description of Faye's high school. It is described as the cleanest and brightest, and yet also "ruffled and doilied". Does ruffled hear means disordered per its literal meaning? And the closest word to doilied I could find is doily, which refers to a small ornamental mat. Does it mean the same in this context? So the high school is clean, yet disordered with misplaced ornamental mats?

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  • It just means ornamental. Ruffled and doilied are both used to describe ornamental. Doily is definitely more metaphorical b/c it doesn't exactly mean ornamental. A ruffle is also a type of ornamentation on something such as clothing or other items. They are both used a bit metaphorically.
    – Kace36
    Commented Jul 25, 2017 at 6:09
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    It describes an intensely feminine room oriented toward traditional values--cooking, sewing. Pink; with ruffles and doilies (probably hand-crocheted); but also clean and bright, no evidence of the mess of boys here. At the time girls took homemaking, boys took shop.
    – Xanne
    Commented Jul 25, 2017 at 7:11

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ruffled here is an adjective derived from the noun ruffle (frill, flounce, ruff, ruche, jabot, furbelow), not from the verb ruffle (disarrange, tousle, dishevel, rumple, run one's fingers through, make untidy, tumble, riffle, disorder).

There's no problem with doilied.

Where's the "misplaced" coming from?

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