Word: poshlost
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...were the Marcos shoes, like the billions of stolen dollars, merely grotesque? The Russian word poshlost suggests the transcendent vulgarity at work in the Marcos spectacle. Poshlost is something preposterously overdone but without self-knowledge or irony. It is comic and sad and awful. An 18th century French merchant of great wealth named Beaujean came to the same dead end as Marcos with his Swiss gold and his ruined kidneys. "He owned amazing gardens," the historian Miriam Beard wrote of Beaujean, "but he was too fat to walk in them . . . He had countless splendid bedrooms and suffered from insomnia...
...poshlost, as the Russians say, an overheated lunge toward the profound, to think of Casablanca in terms of deeper allegory. Still, it is hard to resist delving for Jungian archetypes, primal transactions of the kind that lurk in, say, the Oedipus story (Here's looking...