Sun, Jul 20, 2003 page9

• What honorific is appropriate for John Ashcroft and colleagues?

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  After being introduced by Attorney General John Ashcroft, President Bush responded, "Thank you, General." He then said to the audience of US attorneys, "That means you are all in the Army."

  The president was displaying his instinct for the jocular but inadvertently touched on a controversy in protocol: How do you address an attorney general? Or a solicitor general, inspector general or postmaster general? Is the officeholder properly called "General"?

  Most of us in the language dodge take savage delight in correcting anyone who makes the plural "attorney generals," which is as egregious a gaffe as "court-martials" or "cherry jubilees." In those cases, the nouns (attorney, court, cherry) are followed by their modifiers, the adjectives (general, martial and the attributive noun acting as an adjective, jubilee). To make such a compound title plural, you add an s to the noun -- the thing itself -- not to its modifier.

  That's the rule; salute and do it. But not so easy is the oral salutation. While it seems natural to call an inspector general "Inspector" or a postmaster general "Postmaster," it sounds funny to call an attorney general "Attorney," and to call a solicitor general "Solicitor" begs the question.

  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.

  As the French linguists say, how can I be Saussure? Thanks to Judge Charles R. Breyer of the US District Court of the Northern District of California, I have before me a shortened version of an article by Michael Herz, professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in the quarterly Constitutional Commentary.

  "Notwithstanding the popularity of `Come here, gorgeous,'" Herz writes, "it is grammatically incorrect to call someone by an adjective. ... History confirms what grammar suggests. Historically, general refers not to rank or command but to the breadth of attorneyship."

  Herz tracks the earliest use in English to a 1398 certificate from the Duke of Norfolk's four attorneys general. "The general indicated that these agents could act for their principal on any matter."

  According to the OED, such a wide-ranging counsel in the reign of Edward IV in the 15th century -- who was not assigned to a particular court -- was called "the king's general attorney." A century later, Shakespeare had his Duke of York warn Richard II that if the king were to "call in the letters patent that he hath/By his attorneys-general to sue/His livery .../You pluck a thousand dangers on your head."

  By 1717, Thomas Blount's Law Dictionary made clear the difference between an attorney general, "appointed to manage all our affairs or Suits," and "Attorney Special or Particular ... imployed in one or more Causes particularly specified."

  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.

  All clear now? Let's hear it: "Thanks for that splendid introduction, Attorney General." Just to muddy things up, the plural of attorney general in Britain is, often as not, attorney generals. Shakespeare, a "son of York" and grammatical colonials all disapprove.

  Commending the Supreme Court for its recent decision to strike down laws against consensual adult sodomy practiced by both straights and gays, I wrote, "Homosexuals hail the decision as the law's belated recognition of fairness, which it is, but some would escalate that to American society's acceptance of their lifestyle, which is at least premature."

  James E. Humphreys of the University of Massachusetts comments, "I welcome the libertarian approach, but I am somewhat taken aback by your uncritical use of the code word lifestyle ... always derogative in intent (as in `immoral chosen lifestyle')." David Appell of Miami Shores, Florida, writes, "Lifestyle is a politicized, freighted word meant to devalue sexual orientation as a mere choice rather than something intrinsically and neutrally part of human biology and identity."

  Though the word is often used in an inoffensive way to categorize people based on their consumer or fashion choices -- a sense popularized by Robin Leach's '80s program, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous -- it is now taken by gays as moral condemnation of their sexuality. The New York Times Stylebook differentiates between Robin Leach and homosexual senses, then rejects both: "Lifestyle is shopworn in references to the values and consumption patterns of the well-to-do. And avoid phrases like gay lifestyle, which imply that all gay men and lesbians live the same way."

  The OED's earliest citation is from the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in 1929, but Arnold Zwicky of Stanford points me to the German sociologist George Simmel's 1900 Lebensstiles.

  The word blossomed in the US in the tempestuous '60s, and a June 28, 1970, ad in The New York Times for a book by Dr. Lawrence Hatterer claimed that "Many homosexuals' lifestyles can be changed into heterosexuality."

  The trendy word was picked up as a self-description by long-haired hippie groups in beads celebrating their outcast status. They liked to heckle right-wing politicians and were in turn denounced by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970 for parading those "lifestyles that have neither life nor style." (Who do you suppose wrote that speech?)

  The phrase alternative lifestyle, probably coined by gays as a euphemism for homosexuality, has undergone a turnaround. James Hall III of Bangor, Maine, e-mailed me pointedly, "I don't have a lifestyle; I have a life."
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