colonel

   In Britain the title of an army officer of middle rank. In the USA applied also to officers of the air force and marine corps. ‘Colonel’ is also one of the military titles applied as a civilian honorific in the American South to minor state officials. ‘This American fondness for hollow titles’, writes H.L. Mencken, in The American Language, ‘goes back to colonial days.’ He adds: ‘Colonel is also often bestowed on American newspaper editors by common consent, especially in the South. Thus the rare journalist who declines a colonelcy on the governor’s staff gets it thrust upon him willy-nilly.’ The title is sometimes given as a first name. Daniel Defoe seems to make it such in his Life of Colonel Jack (1722). In William Faulkner’s story Barn Burning there is a boy called Colonel Sartoris Snopes. A retired British army officer with whom the writer once discussed the subject remarked that he had always preferred to be called ‘Colonel’ rather than ‘sir’, the former being ‘more friendly’. Decidedly unfriendly is the use of the term in Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore, where a minister insists on addressing a Captain of the Home Guard as ‘Colonel’.

   If there was one thing Captain Waggett disliked it was being called ‘Colonel’ by Father Macalister. He disliked it so much that he never hesitated to attribute what he considered a breach of good manners to the fact that the priest of Little Todday must have had a drop too much.