The word "potentate" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a person who holds great power or authority, especially a monarch or ruler. Example: The potentate of the kingdom held complete control over all aspects of his subjects' lives, from their rights and freedoms to their economic status.
In a polity where caste affinity matters to voters more than ideology or rectitude, that means a lot.Yet that is not the main reason why for all Mr Veerappan's alleged murders of some 120 policemen, forest officials and others the authorities in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are treating him more like a touchy potentate than a criminal.
They might even form a joint party to contest next year's election.In this section From potentate to prisoner Ballots and bullets The odd couple The colonel's fake diplomacy A light footprint What a zoo At boiling point Staggering in the right direction ReprintsThe present government of national unity was put together by Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, after the election.
Officially beholden to Kabul and appointed by the president, Hamid Karzai, in practice he is his own man, a potentate of the north with huge wealth and carefully consolidated support.
The poor's demands for wells and schools, shown on local television, only serve to burnish his image as a benign potentate.
Cash payments to the poor through the Bolsa Família programme which are made electronically cannot easily be stolen or directed to supporters of a local potentate.
His courtiers were outraged, but the potentate stayed calm.
In his "Political Dictionary" he later explained that negativism was the key word; that nabob, from the Urdu, meaning governor, hence self-important potentate, was the ideal practitioner of a negative outlook (see the use by John Adams in 1776); and that nattering was meant to denote complaining, but that Stewart Alsop, his pundit-mentor, had told him that the British use was closer to chattering.
One passage describes how Mr Clinton usually receptive to Miss Lewinsky's attentions when chatting on the phone with congressmen shunted her aside for nearly half an hour for a telephone call from a real potentate: Alfonso Fanjul.
IN EUROPE in the 16th and 17th centuries Moctezuma II, the Aztec potentate who submitted to Cortés and his Spanish conquistadors, was a figure of exotic fascination.
He is not only the chief executive and commander-in-chief of the armed forces; he is a patron, whose networks of clients and dependants spread wide, and a potentate, surrounded by guards, flunkeys, limousines, adoring women.
When Mr Solana journeys eastwards for example, during his family holidays in Russia and Poland he goes as a sort of occidental potentate, symbolising the power and glamour of Uncle Sam and his friends.
