Potemkin Village

From the Dragon City Journal.

proper noun

[Po-TEM'-kin] or (for purists) [Po-TYEM'-kin]

Something that appears elaborate and impressive but in actual fact lacks substance

• “the Potemkin village of this country's borrowed prosperity” (Lewis H. Lapham).

After Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemki, who had elaborate fake villages constructed for Catherine the Great's tours of Ukraine and the Crimea.

— The American Heritage Dictionary v. 3.5 1994.

Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemki

allposters.com.

Catherine II, Czarina

of Russia, 1762-1796

D. B. Weldon Library

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Potemkin village IN USE:

The Conservative Book Club ads on [Ann Coulter's] site were a Potemkin's Village scam as well, the strategy they used would be to buy these 'books' by wingnut authors in bulk, which artificially inflated their Best Seller rankings.

Posted by: Abbycat. July 19, 2009 at 12:16 a.m.on silenedmajority.blog.com in response to article titled "Ann" Coulter Ranks Blacks Above Insects. Then she attributes her mindset to liberals.

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Has no-one learned from the Bush Administration's Potemkin Village, er, town hall meetings? Don't let in [to Democrat town halls] anyone who disagrees with you and eject anyone who looks like they might. Tip: scan the parking lot for bumper stickers and have your goons pretend they're Secret Service.

Latest Republican Strategy of Violence. Posted on: August 3, 2009 9:20 PM, by Greg Laden. Greg Laden's Blog: Science as Culture - Culture as Science, Scienceblogs.com/gredladen.

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In December of 2005, as the following citation shows, Frank Rich, OP-ED columnist for the New York Times, found the Potemkin village image useful in explaining his perception that the Bush administration was staging success-draped events for American dignitaries visiting the country Iraq to make on-the-ground assessments.

When a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did,decode our rulers' fictions to discern what's really happening.

"It Takes a Potemkin Village" By Frank Rich. The New York Times OP-ED, Sunday Dec. 11, 2005.

Then in September of 2007, Rich — perhaps unable to find a alternate epithet — found the Potemkin village image once again apropos to describe his perception that the Bush White House was still staging false events.

A more elaborate example of [the George W. Bush] administration Disneyland can be found in those bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries whenever the cameras roll. Last week the Washington Post discovered that at least one of them, the Dora Market, is a Potemkin village, open only a few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers.

As the Araqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up." Frank Rich. OP-ED, The New York Times. Sept. 9, 2007.

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FOOMMP!

straightdope.com

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IS THE STORY OF THE POTEMKIN VILLAGES TRUE?

Of the five etymological sources I consulted, four dodge the proposition that Potemkin did in fact supervised construction of actual sham villages, telling us timorously, instead, that the idea of sham villages comes to us second hand — with no indication of whose hand is holding the pen scribbling the tale! The other two sources suggest that some minimal cardboard shaming of the riverside landscape may have occurred, but that ultimately the constructions known as Potemkin Villages less existential than they were verbal invention, mere fictions floated into the political rumorsphere by Potemkin rivals.

1. Dictionary.com reports that the presumptive villages were

named after Prince Potëmkin, who allegedly had villages of cardboard constructed for Catherine II's visit to the Ukraine and the Crimea in 1787 [emphasis supplied],

without citing who did the "alleging."

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2. Similarly, The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia avers that

Potemkin's successful disguising of the weak points of his administration led to the claim that he erected mere facades — "Potemkin villages" — to show Catherine on her tour of the region [emphasis added].

A claim, made by whom?

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3. The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the phrase

Potemkin villages — Potëmkinskaja derevnja in Russian — denotes any of the sham villagessaid to have been built by Potemkin to give a false impression of prosperity in the Crimea, in advance of Catherine II's visit in 1787. Chiefly fig. [again, emphasis added]

OED editors crouch into the passive voice here—"said to have been built"— without telling us who did the "saying." But among the historical citations it provides to illustrate the term in use, the OED lexicographers includes a 1939 citation by a certain G. Soloveytchik who claimed he knew the identify of the person who began all of this, alleging that

Potemkin's detractors have asserted that he built whole sham villages, with cardboard houses and paste palaces..in order to create a false picture of progress and prosperity... The originator of these stories . . . was the Saxon diplomat Helbig, and the legend of ‘Potemkin Villages’ . . . as a synonym of sham owes its inception to him.

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4. Unlike the three references quoted thus far, the American Heritage Dictionary (4th Ed.) states directly that the sham villages were, in fact, built along the the River Dnieper, stating that they were named

[a]fter Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, who had elaborate fake villages constructed for Catherine the Great's tours of the Ukraine and the Crimea.

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5. Finally, the redoubtable Encyclopedia Britannica (2007), counters all of the texts just cited, dismissing the sham villages and the cavorting peasants as an "apocryphal tale":

[T]here was exaggeration in all [Potemkin’s] enterprises. . . . Catherine's tour of the south in 1787 was a triumph for Potemkin, for he disguised all the weak points of his administration—hence the apocryphal tale of his erecting artificial villages to be seen by the empress in passing.

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WHAT TO MAKE OF THESE VARIANT CITATIONS :

Realizing that quotations from a mere five reference texts — reputable though they may be — do not offer historical consistency on the matter, we find ourselves still wondering: How many square feet or acres, if any, of townsite phantasmagoria appeared along the banks of the Dnieper in 1778 under the direction of Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin?

The answer: We may never know with certainty.

But at least it is fun to imagine that along the banks of the Dnieper that summer some manner of townsfolk histrionics tap-danced and whooped things up against the backdrop of extended rows of specious facades. And when the last illusion had passed from imperceptive Catherine's view, it is not unreasonable to imagine that she turned her fluttering eyes toward the fawning peeps of her lover Grigori Aleksandrovich and whispered in swooning Russian: "O, Aleksie, my sweet: I approve!"

3

extemporanea

To the Reader

This posting is longer than most because the more I learned about the author of the example sentence, Dorothy Parker, and of Marie of Roumania, whom Parker makes reference, the more compelling these extraordinary women became and, in my view, worthy of reportage. — J.H.

Marie of Roumania

rhymes with extemporanea.

extemporanea

[ex-temp-o-RAY-ne-ah]

Noun

Actions of an extemporaneous nature

The plural affix ea means of the nature of.

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Note the absence of a citation from a standard dictionary. This is because  extemporanea is a nonce word, one invented (or borrowed) for use on a single occasion, and no dictionary carries many such words because of their infrequency. Neither do they even list extemporanea as a rare cousin of extempore, "without preparation," or extemporize, "to improvise." — The Little OED.

The base of the word comes from the Latin ex tempore, in which ex- means "out of" and tempore, "time," thus leading us to the following definition of the adjective extempore: offhand, in accordance with the needs or whims of the moment. —OED

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The OED tells us that eventually, 12 cognates — spin-offs from a base — developed from ex tempore — including"extemporist, extemoranean, and extemporate (now obsolete) and extempore, extemporaaneous, andextemporize, still current." But nowhere among them appears the useful noun extemporanea.

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IN EARLY USE

You'll find the word prominent in the title of famous and huge (443 pages) 18th century compendium of ailment remedies by Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) titled

Pharmacopoeia extemporanea : or, a body of prescripts. In which forms of select remedies, accommodated to most intentions of cure, are propos'd. London: printed for B. Walford,1710.

Because Fuller collected the remedies at random or, one might say, the remedies came to him seeminglly extemporaneously, he decided to include the word extemporanea in his title.

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USE IN CYBERSPACE

Though extemporanea has not as yet found a place in a standard dictionary, it has found a place on the internet at a half dozen or more sites and blogs (e.g. "Lorie's Light Extemporanea"), where each editor assums that the reader can most probably discern the term's meaning from the context presented.

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IN LITERARY USE

To see, actually, hear the word in clever use we turn to a poem titled "Comment" by Dorothy Parker, an "American writer and poet, best know for her causic wit, wise cracks, and sharp eye for 20th century urban foibles."

— Wikipedia.com

Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Roumania.

First published in 1926

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COMMENTS ON THE POEM

Yes, the rhyming of extemporanea and Marie of Roumania is clever and memorable, but what are we to make of this Maria of Roumania? Who was she and what significance does she bring to the poem?

A quick way to learn about Queen Marie's life is to read the following brief editorial review by Maureen Cleave of a 1985 book by Hanna Pakula titled The Last Romantic: Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania:

Queen Marie of Roumania was one of the most fascinating crowned heads of Europe and one of the most extraordinary and independent women of our century. The granddaughter of

Queen Victoria and Tzar Alexander II of Russia, at seventeen Marie left the glittering courts of Western Europe to marry the Crown Prince of Roumania. Drawing upon the young queen s diaries and letters, the author [Hanna Pakula] describes her struggle to gain an independent footing in the male- dominated court of Roumania, her early years as one of the most admired beauties of Europe, and the decisive period during World War I when she all but ran the Roumanian Government.

— Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard for flagsofourfathers.net

There is more about Marie of Roumania below at MEDIA ICON OF THE 1920s.

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THE POETIC EFFECTS OF EXTEMPORANEA AND MARIE OF ROUMANIA IN "COMMENT"

After the gushing opening two lines "Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, / A medley of extemporanea," the speaker (Parker) gushes even more in the third with the apothgem, "And love is a thing that can never go wrong." The first-time reader may not sense what's coming, but at poem's end we realize that the first three lines are but a set up for the irony that arrives in the fourth line, specifically with the appearance of the name Marie of Roumania.

The speaker has gone as far as she can with seemingly forced optimism. Suddenly she wakes up from her dream of glorious song, her metaphoric "medley of extemporanea, and love "that can never go wrong."to face the truth: she's nothing but a lost weary soul. But she doesn't sink into self-pity. Instead, she makes a joke, claiming ironically in line four that she not who she appears to be, but, rather, the famous, celebrated European queen, Marie of Roumania. What began in sweet song ended in sour irony.

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SO WHO WAS DOROTHY PARKER?

The Ladies' Home Journal book 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century (1998) avers that

Dorothy Parker stands out as the wittiest and most urbane of the legendary circle of acid-tongued jazz-age wits known as the Algonquin Round table (named after the Manhattan hotel where, in 1919, the group began meeting for regular alcohol-drenched lunches).

In the imaginative world of "Comment" Marie may be in ascendance over Parker's lowly speaker, but

seventy-five years later, in reality, Parker the writer comes into her own.

In the 1998 book 100 Most Important Women of the Twentieth Century, she is duly honored in the category Writers & Journalists with a page that presents a 3 by 5 picture of her and 203 words of adulatory prose — while in the Political Figures category, we find the names Eva Peron, Indira Gandi, Madam Mao, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, and others, but — oddly — not a word or picture for Marie of Roumania.

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DOROTHY PARKER,1893-1967

Famous for her light verse, ("Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses") and the acerbic book and theater reviews she contributed to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Parker

elevated the wisecrack to a minor art form. When a date told her he couldn't bear fools, she replied, "That's odd, your mother could." Another young man was deemed a "rhinestone in the rough." . . . .

In a male dominated literary world, Parker not only carved out a central position for women of wit (she is constantly cited as a role model for such latter-day humorists as Fran Lebowitz and Nora Ephron), she too the very subjects that male writers scorned as light. Just beneath the polished surface and Smart Set trappings of her best work lurks a deadly serious theme — exploitation, specifically of women by men.

Glennon, Lorraine, Ed. Ladies Home Journal© 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century. Des Moines, Iowa: Ladies' Home Journal© Books. 1998. 74.

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MEDIA ICON OF THE 1920's

But during the 1920s, Maria was in her ascendancy. Americans and Europeans of the day would have immediately recognized the name Queen Marie of Roumania and know of her multiple virtues — charm, beauty, strength, generosity — and of her popularity as an author, of the adulation she enjoyed from her own people and of admirers on the Continent and in America, and of the political power she wielded at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to assure that her country's state boundaries remained in tact and even expanded after the war.

Via the magazines, newspapers, radio of the 1920s, Marie of Roumania became a media icon of her day, appearing twice on the cover of Time Magazine, most memorably during her 1926 visit to the United States.

To see a remarkable video on Youtube of black and white footage of Marie's visit to the U.S., click: here.

I could find no original footage of Dorothy Parker on line, but she's a hot topic on the web. A good place to start learning more about her is The Dorothy Parker Society at dorothyparker.com.

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For this writer — and, he hopes, for the reader — it has been a most engaging adventure following the word extemporanea into the lives of two legendary women of the 20th century, Dorothy Parker, "the wittiest and most urbane of . . . acid-tongued jazz-age wits," and "The Last Romantic," Marie of Roumania.

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