F. Scott Fitzgerald may have committed neologism in his story from 1922, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (I’m reading the version collected as Tales of the Jazz Age in the Library of America edition, pp. 913-953). Rich scion John Unger is visiting his richer school friend Percy Washington in Percy’s family retreat, a Hearstian fastness in cis-Canadian Montana:
On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland—and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had heard before.
Now my desktop source, The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Don Michael Randel, ed.), defines acciaccatura as a musical ornament of the 17th and 18th centuries, featuring a nonharmonic tone that is neither prepared nor resolved. Randel proposes a derivation “perhaps from acciaccare, to crush.” But he doesn’t provide an English musical sense for acciaccare on its own.
Google Books does turn up James F. Warner’s 1841 translation from the German of Godfrey Weber’s General Music Teacher, which does treat the two words together in one glossary entry:
The substantive acciaccatura, from the verb acciaccare, means literally a violent seizing, or attacking, and is employed in a similar sense in music, though it is used in such extremely different applications, that its signification has become entirely indefinite. (p. v)
Not much to hang onto there, and certainly not enough for us to guess what “the faint acciaccare sound of violins” might sound like. Indeed the only examples of acciaccare in English that I’ve found are quotations from Fitzgerald.
By the way, what does “a rococo harmony” suggest to you?
A page previous, Fitzgerald does better. After being picked up at a train flag stop, bouncing along a boulder-flecked road, and undergoing a sort of portage, John and Percy find the way to the castle easier going:
“The worst is over,” said Percy, squinting out the window. “It’s only five miles from here, and our own road—tapestry brick—all the way.”
Tapestry brick was a fancy brick with variable coloration, used to clad buildings. A tony apartment building that opened in Washington in 1925 featured its tapestry brick exterior as a selling point. It would seem to have a rough texture: one source uses “rug face brick” as a synonym and shows a brick with irregular vertical striations. A document prepared by D.C.’s Capitol Hill Preservation Society describes tapestry brick as “usually tan or buff-colored.” Fiske & Co. manufactured what it claimed was “the only Tapestry Brick in the world” and used Tapestry as an unregistered trademark. Their mark, undefended, fell into generic use, and the product ultimately fell out of popularity.
So shiny, polished bricks were out of fashion at the time. Still, I would think they would make for a smoother ride when used as a road surface.