Happy belated birthday, Grigori Alexandrovich.

No, I'm not referring to one of my kids. I just realized that I missed celebrating earlier this week the birthday of a famous Russian that I had put on my calendar: Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin.

If that name's not ringing any bells, think of the last name with the word "village" after it. A "Potemkin village" is an idiom that you hear all the time, but what do you know about how it got started?

Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin, or more formally, Prince Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin-Tavricheski, was born on September 24, 1739 near Smolensk. But despite the royal sounding name, the title was not his at birth. Born to a military family, he was granted the rank of prince in 1776, for what may have been his, umm, prior service to the crown. Potemkin, you see, became the paramour of Catherine the Great, and for nearly two decades exerted almost as much influence over Russia as she did. He lived in high style and built one of the grandest residences in Russia at that time, the Tavricheski dvorets or Tauride Palace, which you can visit if your adoption journey takes you to St. Petersburg.

But about those Potemkin villages. The tale I had always heard was that Potemkin was charged with expanding Russia's nation-building in Crimea (now part of Ukraine) and that meant building new settlements for the ethnic Russians who were moving to the area. He supposedly got either a little behind in his efforts or a bit over budget, so to make the area look like it would have had he been on top of both, he had fake towns erected along Catherine's route.

He didn't: He built real cities and real colonists came to live in them. Historians now believe the derogatory term was coined by Potemkin's enemies--in and out of the Russian court--to discredit him.

Potemkin is recognized for being fairly skilled in military matters and economic development, if we can use the modern term. Irony of ironies: A battleship christened in his honor at a port he developed became the first step in the revolution that would do away with Russia's tsars and tsarinas. But as for that idiom, it sounds like it's high time to retire it.

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