The scary thing to me about that article are all the people defending him in the comments. I can’t believe there are so many delusional people.
“Correct” is subjective in language. I consider my case for correct, which includes three separate sources of support, to be stronger than yours, which is merely an appeal to a single authority. The authority in question, I might add, (the U.S. Code) makes no assertion of being an authority on English usage. Unofficial or informal does not equal incorrect.
I think it may be worthwhile to construct an analogy totally disconnected from the drama of the Iraq war.
Here’s the situation:
Soldier A serves under Captain John Smith. Soldier A has a deep, personal dislike for Captain John Smith because it is a well known fact within the unit that Capt. Smith is involved in an illegal smuggling ring with criminal elements of the local civilian population. Capt. Smith orders Soldier A to head out of the base on a reconnaissance mission, and Soldier A refuses, because he believes Capt. Smith is not fit to command and thus Soldier A reasons he should not have to obey his orders.
After Soldier A’s refusal to obey a direct order, he is placed under arrest pending a full investigation.
Additional facts:
-While many believe Capt. Smith is involved with a local smuggling ring, this was investigated within the past year by the military police and they found no evidence to support these charges
My conclusion: Soldier A acted illegally and should be punished. Even if Capt. Smith was involved in a smuggling ring, the proper authorities had previously investigated it and found no evidence to support these allegations. Soldier A’s personal opinion and personal beliefs are not the final say on whether or not Capt. Smith is fit for command.
Relevance: The birther does not believe Obama is eligible for the office of President due to his location of birth. Meaning he doesn’t believe he should have command, and thus believes he should not have to obey orders that ultimately emanate from the civilian authority of the U.S. government (as headed by President Obama.) However, the birther is not the authority that gets to determine whether or not someone is eligible for the Presidency. Those authorities long ago accepted Obama and there have never been any serious legal challenges or even questions by any officials of any of the 50 states in which Obama as registered as a candidate, nor have there been any questions by the Chief Justice who swore Obama in or the Congress that certified the results of the Presidential election. So while the birther has his right to an opinion, for the purposes of U.S. law, there are clear authorities who get to determine things under the law. (That doesn’t mean they are “absolutely right”, it just means they had their say, and that overrules what other people think, even if the other people were factually correct.)
Second situation:
Soldier B is serving under Lt. Bill Williams in a hostile urban combat environment. A large residential apartment complex in the neighborhood has been overrun by enemy forces, and is being used as a base of operations and fortified location for action against Lt. Williams’ unit.
This situation has persisted for some days, and has harassed Lt. Williams unit in their operations in the neighborhood. One morning Lt. Williams has decided on a plan of action to neutralize the building and the enemy combatants within, and begins issuing orders to his men.
Lt. Williams orders Soldier B to provide information to an artillery crew so that the building can be neutralized by artillery fire. Soldier B, under the understanding that some civilians are still inside the building refuses the order, saying it is unlawful to kill civilians. Lt. Williams repeats the order, and tells Soldier B that it is within the legal conduct of warfare to inflict civilian deaths as long as it is not excessive within the context of the military advantage to be gained by the action.
Soldier B disagrees with this policy, and again refuses the order. Soldier B is then arrested pending further investigation.
Additional facts:
-The U.S. Department of Defense defines collateral damage as: "unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack.”
My conclusion: Soldier B acted illegally, and disobeyed perfectly valid orders. His situation is different from that of Soldier A because he questioned the legality of the order itself, not the authority of the person giving the order. However, Soldier B, just like Soldier A is not the final authority for determining what orders are or are not lawful. For the purposes of determining legal action under the U.S. military legal system, there is a large body of law and precedent, as well as regulations and codes that determine the legality of a specific action. The doctrine of collateral damage is very old and well tested legally, while some may find the order or the acceptance of collateral damage to be morally repugnant it violates no law that binds the U.S. military.
Relevence: Watada believed that the order he was given was unlawful. A soldier does have the right to refuse an unlawful order. However, it is not up to pundits in the media, the United Nations, the soldier in question, or people on a message board to make the ultimate determination as to whether the order was lawful or unlawful. That is left up to the court system. While Watada by and large escaped serious punishment because the court could not reach a unanimous decision on his guilt, the judge in his case actually ruled that the legality of the war was a “non justiciable political question” and that the order he was given was a lawful order. (I can guarantee a similar ruling in Soldier B’s case concerning collateral damage, and since it happened in a war zone he would actually be in unimaginably more trouble than Watada was.)
The UN Security Council can’t rule the invasion illegal. Two of the five permanent members (ie., members with automatic veto power) were the main parties to the war (other than Iraq, of course.)
Personally I thought the soldiers who refused to deploy during the Iraq War were in the wrong also. I can understand having moral objections, but when you sign up for the military you basically do what you’re told. As morally objectionable as the Iraq War was, it was lawfully voted into action by the U.S. Congress.
OTOH, if you see something like Abu Ghraib that’s clearly unlawful and decided to express your objections and refuse to do as you’re told, well more power to you.
What if you think the whole war is clearly unlawful? Or that the entire government power structure is clearly unlawful, due to having a Hawaiian at its head?
Myself I’d say, “More power to you - in jail!” And if I agreed with the guy about the illegality I’d be proud of him if he chose jail. (If all soldiers chose jail that would end the war, after all.) But what do you think?
It is, as you concede, the U.S. Code (28 U.S.C. 1, as it happens) which sets forth the actual title of the Chief Justice of the United States. Words in statutes have meaning. The title as I describe it is objectively and legally correct; the one you offer is not.
As it happens, I’ve recently been preparing a Staff Report that addresses this question in passing, so if you need additional citations other than the Federal statute which actually sets forth the title, I happily refer you to Robert J. Steamer’s Chief Justice: Leadership and the Supreme Court (University of South Carolina Press 1986); the White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs’s The Office of the Chief Justice (University of Virginia 1984), Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Doubleday 2007), and Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (Simon & Schuster 1979).
The Straight Dope is committed to fighting ignorance. Most people who get the Chief Justice’s title wrong probably do so because they don’t know any better. You do know better, but insist that your version of the title is as good as the actual title. You even acknowledge that the title changed more than a century ago, under Chief Justice Chase, but still take to the battlements to defend the obsolete version of it. That just baffles me.
I’m going to weigh in here (against my better judgment) and point out that “Chief Justice of the United States” v. “CJOTSC” is not simply a usage issue; it’s an official title.
It’s like saying “President of America”- people may know what you mean, but it’s still not correct.
On the other hand, I thought the title was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court until… well, now actually.
The U.S. Code has no provenance or authority to regulate informal speech. I “conceded” nothing. “Chief justice of the United States” is the official title, which I said in my first post. X being an official title does not imply that not X is “incorrect.” Lots of things have official titles and for each of those official titles there are any number of phrases in the English language that are not incorrect, regardless of whether they comply with official statements.
I am as capable as you are of finding such citations. To the extent that they are statements of official policy, they are irrelevant to the question of whether a phrase is legitimate in informal usage.
And part of fighting that ignorance should be that a statute that sets forth an official title is not dispositive on the question of whether a descriptive phrase used informally is okay. The government, the Congress, legal scholars, historians, yea, even the Constitution do not decide whether our use of words to mean what we intend them to mean is “correct.”
Ah, a venture at usage data. Fine, I accept this as valid speculation. In fact, however, it is support for the notion that in informal speech, the description “chief justice of the Supreme Court” is correct. In questions of usage, what most people believe to be correct, is in fact correct and isn’t trumped by official designations of formal titles.
Do you go around referring to every damn thing in life by its actual title? I doubt it. Official titles are for official situations.
It baffles you, because you are mistaken as to the provenance of an official title. We speakers of English collectively are ultimately the ones who decide what is correct usage. For a continuous, unbroken period of more than a century, “most people” as you say, have been using a term in our casual speech that differs from the official title. That means we collective generations of Americans have decided through the ultimate linguistic authority of usage that it is perfectly correct for the circumstances in which we use it.
You are also mistaken as to the meaning of the term “obsolete” in language. If everyone uses it and everyone knows what each other means by it, then it is the opposite of obsolete.
This statement is meaningless. If you are in a situation in which you intend to use an official title, then the question of what is the official title is relevant. If you are in a situation that does not call for an official title, then it’s not.
If you are communicating within the context of a society in which the U.S. is routinely referred to as “America,” in which this is the customary usage, and in which it is understood by your audience, then of course it’s correct. Depending on the linguistic context, “president of America” is exactly as correct as “the American president” or “the U.S. president.” Remember, the official title is “president of the United States of America.” How many times in your life have you used this exact phrase?
And it’s very likely that you didn’t need to know it until now either. The people who are in the business of making formal communications that call for the official title know it and use it appropriately. For the rest of us, it may be an interesting bit of information, but is ultimately not relevant to our day-to-day usage of language.
As was alluded to in another current thread, the Lego Group would very much like people to follow these rules:
Well, hell if I’m going to follow any damn one of those rules. Those rules relevant to their own usage of their trademark (and of their business partners) and are 100 percent irrelevant to my usage of them, especially informally. I’m never going to write “Lego” in all capitals. I’m going to continue to call the blocks “Legos” as long as it suits me to do so. And I’m not going to bother to figure out where the registered trademark symbol is on my keyboard. Even in “official” uses related to my professional work, I’m not going to follow these rules, except perhaps when discussing their legal significance.
It’s the same with the chief justice. The office’s official designation is relevant for official circumstances. Otherwise any accurate description of the office is perfectly legitimate, especially one that has the popular usage support of “chief justice of the Supreme Court.”
How are morons getting through medical school?
Maybe the anti-HCR fanatics are right: the American medical industry can’t accommodate universal access without killing three-quarters of the population. :rolleyes:
When I worked for the Air Force, my office had to arrange a meeting with the base command staff and a representative of the local railroad so he could explain to a Lt. Col. that the reason why trains were blowing their horns wasn’t because they were trying to harass the residents of base housing, but because there’s a railroad crossing adjacent to the base. And when the railroad rep was done explaining the laws that governed trains and railroad crossings, the Lt. Col. didn’t believe him, and remained convinced the railroad was involved in a conspiracy against the Air Force.
No it’s not.
He still should have resigned his commission on the day Iraq was invaded, though.
Sure would like to see that declaration, then.
We will simply have to agree to disagree, acsenray, as to the Chief Justice’s title. I can’t state things any more plainly than I have. It’s become obvious we aren’t going to convince each other.
I don’t think you’re disagreing about the Chief Justice’s title.
I think you’re disagreeing about whether a usage can legitimately be labeled as “correct” or “incorrect.”
Yes, we’re disagreeing over what “incorrect” means in the context of usage and whether it’s correct to tell people that their usage is incorrect in a given linguistic context. “Formal” or “official” defines “correct” in only limited contexts.
Okay, seriously, enough with the nitpicking. Can we get back to birther-soldier RO, please?
No way! let the nitpicks continue!
Don’t you mean, “… is less important than who [del]ratified his election as[/del] elected him President: the Electoral College, just as the Constitution requires.”
It’s the Senate and Representatives, sitting jointly, who then ratify the election, just as the Twelfth Amendment requires. 
Most of them are direct-commission and are joining for the loan repayment program. They enter with no military background at the rank of captain, sometimes major, and should rise to LTC if they keep their noses clean for 10-20 years.
His claim about having to provide a birth certificate for induction is silly. The Armed Forces accepts a ‘Certificate of Live birth’. I know because I was enlisted and later commissioned with no certificate other than that. I think this guy has just put in his 18 years and is now hearing the call of a comfortable and lucrative private practice. I certainly can’t blame those motives, and it sucks that he’s one of the unlucky few who will have to go to a full-blown war to earn those education benefits. But to avoid deployment on a specious legalism is no different from desertion in my eyes.