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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atavistic

Homo erectus.

adj.

[at'-a-VIS'-tic]

In psychology, showing primitive forms of behavior

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atavism

noun

[AT'-i-viz'-um]

The Random House Webster's College Dictionary (2000) recounts these definitions of atavism:

1. a. the reappearance in an individual of characteristics of some remote ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations.

b. an individual embodying such a reversion.

2. reversion to an earlier type; throwback.

IN USE

We need to stop Supreme Court confirmation hearings. . . . . The game (and it is one) becomes an atavistic search for an emotional gotcha moment, a test more appropriate to a hockey goalie than a Supreme Court justice.

Fineman, Howard. The Take. "Advise and Shut up Already: Let's End Confirmation hearings." Newsweek, 27 July 2009: 28.

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COMMENT

Taking the long ancestral view, we could say that Fineman is suggests archly that certain Judiciary Committee members seem to be acting less like members of the generation of homo sapiens, but more like members of the next ancestral generation behind us, homo erectus. Bob Holms of New Scientist (1 August, 2009, 6) tells us that the average brain volume of homo sapiens is 1500 cubic centimeters and that that of homo erectus is smaller by a third, at only 1000 cubic centimeters. In a sense, Fineman is telling each perceived atavist on the committee: "Grow your brain!"

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ORIGIN

From the Latin atavas, meaning ancestor

OTHER FORMS

at'a-vis'ti-cal-ly (adverb)

at'a-vist (noun)

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dweeb

albertalter.com

noun

A person held in contempt, esp. one ridiculed as studious, puny, or unfashionable; a fool.

That definition comes from the OED,

which also likens dweeb to

nerd:

an insignificant, foolish, or socially inept person; a person who is boringly conventional or studious.

Now also: spec. a person who pursues an unfashionable or highly technical interest with obsessive or exclusive dedication.

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SYNONYMS

Keying off the word nerd, the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (2003) offers bore as a standard usage synonym; the terms dork, (our word) dweeb, nimrod, geek, drip, and loser as informal usage choices; and techie as a job-specific descriptor.

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IN USE

Of course, Chief Justice John Roberts portrayed himself four years ago as a cautious and judicially modest dweeb.

— Fineman, Howard. The Take. Advise and Shut Up Already: Let's end confirmation hearings. Newsweek 27 July 2009: 28.

The optional noun phrase "a cautious and judicially modest nerd" would fail here because nerd tends to carry a higher pejorative quotient than does the more endearing dweeb. I think this is so because of the associations of the sound projected by each word. Nerd sounds more aggressive, rhyming with grrr and seems more fulfilled when braced with an exclamation mark: "Nerd!" Dweeb does not exclaim. It simply states itself, with the necessarily deliberate enunciations of the consonants.

Dweeb in Chief

Justice John Roberts

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COMMENTS

Dweeb appears on Words Worth quite simply because I find it fun to pronounce. Dweeb: opens with an assertive dental d, flings itself into a childlike wee, and closes with a firm puff, almost a pop!, of a b.

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If you agree that dweeb speaking is fun, put your voice around the even more playful adjective, dweeby, and you'll enjoy all of the fun of dweeb, plus bee as a closing rhyme. The OED sample sentence carries a third ee-rhyme with the proper name Reeve:

As the dweeby, narcissistic Blaine, Reeve is male-model handsome and bland —just what the role calls for; 1988 Washington Post 4 Mar. D7/2

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ORIGIN

But of what stuff is such an odd word made? For a succinct answer, we turn to the New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd Ed.), which, first of all, states that the word's earliest appearance occurred in the 1980s and, then, suggests that it is "perhaps a blend of dwarf and early 20th century feeb, "a feebleminded person' (from feeble)."

Learning that dweeb may have sprung in part from dwarf prompts a degree of PC discomfort, if we imagine the original coiner of the term to be a person who thought of dwarves as lesser humans. But we will take the more charitable view and suggest that mating dwarf with feeb was no more than a dual trope that transfers smallness in size (mass) to a perceived smallness of mental acumen in the person deemed dweeby or, with a bit of literary sniff, dweebish.

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In one sense, a word made of five characters shaped into a single syllable makes for a mere mite of a word. But considering its sound effects and its likely devious origins, dweeb makes for one feisty bantam of a word.

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cashier t.v.

/ca•sheer/

Cashier, as a transitive verb, means to "dismiss from a position of command or authority, esp. with disgrace."* Late 16th C.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary cites this example from W. S. Maugham:

He'd been kicked out of the Officer's Club at Warsaw and cashiered because he he'd been caught cheating at cards.

The word recently made an apt appearance in a Time magazine movie review of Joel and Ethan Coen's 2008 film, "Burn After Reading":

In the suburbs of Washington — the city of spies — lust, greed and chance trip up a cashiered CIA analysis (John Malkovich), his doctor wife (Tilda Swinton), a federal marshal (George Clooney), a lovelorn gym employee (Frances McDormand) and her oafish accomplice (Brad Pitt, in the sharpest, sweetest comic role of his career." ("The Coen Brothers' Post-Oscar Thriller," Movies, Sept. 8,2008.)

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Synonyms for cashiered include dismiss, boot, bounce, can, discharge, drop, free, sack, eject, expel, oust.**

Common command verbs that do the authoritative work of cashiering a subordinate are scram, beat it, piss off (mainly British), f--- off, and my favorite, a nautical term from the early 17th century: Avast!

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As a noun, cashier means something else entirely. It refers to a person, "one who has charge of cash or money, esp. one who superintends monetary transactions, as in a bank."**

The noun phrase cashier's check designates "a check drawn by a bank upon its own funds and signed by its cashier."**

Since the noun and verb share the same spelling, one might wonder whether these cashiers derive from the same source and thus share some sort of affinity? The answer is "No," as phrase etymologists William and Mary Morris explain in their usual clear, simple, personable style:

The two words are not the same, since they come from different routes into English. The first cashier — the one you'll see at your friendly local supermarket, where she's more likely to be called a "check-out clerk"— gets her name from the French cassier, meaning "money box." The second cashier — ("As the result of the court-martial, the colonel was cashiered from the service") comes from Old French casser, "to discharge or annul," and that came from the Latin quassare, "to shake or break into pieces. (115-116)***

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The noun version of cashier is cashierment, as in "Mr. Trump makes all decisions concerning staff: recruitment, development, retirement, cashierment."

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Sources:

* Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Fifth Edition, 2002.

** The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000.

*** Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

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