General agreement
Catching up on some back reading the other day while visiting with my sister and her family, I came upon last week’s (July 20) New York Times Sunday Magazine. I derived a modicum of satisfaction from reading Bill Safire’s On Language column, in which he confirms my own misgivings, reported a couple of months ago, about John Ashcroft’s insistence on being called “General”.
Safire’s sources trace the origins of the term “Attorney General” back to the 14th century, conclusively demonstrating that “general” is in actuality an adjective that modifies the noun “attorney”. As Safire points out:
How did rule-abiding citizens, dutifully using the plural ‘’attorneys general,’’ get into this bind? What turned these civilian appellations into martial arts? Is it right and proper to call an attorney general ‘’General’’?
The answer is no. Any attorney general, national or state, who demands to be called ‘’General’’ is guilty of nominally impersonating an officer, an offense almost as horrendous as aggravated mopery.
Later in the column, Safire reiterates just how ludicrous Ashcroft’s self-important vanity really is:
That’s the way it is in America today. In the Department of Justice, criminal attorneys and civil attorneys work under a general attorney breezily called ‘’the A.G.’’ He’s an attorney, not a general. You can call the Army’s judge advocate general ‘’General,’’ because that’s his or her rank. But don’t call the Navy’s judge advocate general that, because he or she is by statute a rear admiral and gets called ‘’Admiral.’’ Call the surgeon general ‘’Doctor.’’ Call the solicitor general ‘’Solicitor General,’’ or if that’s too big a mouthful, in the present case a simple ‘’Mr.’’ or ‘’Ted’’ will do.
Though he shows convincingly that Ashcroft’s demand to be addressed by an improper honorific is self-righteously arrogant nonsense, Safire doesn’t attempt to trace the beginnings of the recent popularity of this now-common mistake. So I still haven’t found any evidence in support of my own contention that G. Gordon Liddy started it when he referred to John Mitchell that way during his testimony before the 1973 Senate Watergate committee.
Someday, I’ll dig through the records of that testimony, to at least confirm for myself that Liddy used the term. I’ve also dropped an email to Safire, asking whether he’d come across Liddy’s statement while researching his column. Not that I expect an answer from Safire…
In any case, making the connection with Liddy and Mitchell wouldn’t demonstrate anything conclusive about the origin of today’s militaristic common parlance, but it would at least remind me that I’m not just making this stuff up.
Comments
I can think of a lot of things to call the current Solicitor General, but “Ted” is not one of them. What I’d like to call him is unsuitable for family websites; he and Ashcroft are a matched pair.
George Stephanopoulos to Ashcroft at the end of his Sunday morning interview/spinfest: “Thank you, General.”
Grrrrrrrrr…
Er, George is a young punk who doesn’t know any better? Nope, that won’t fly…
