The history of saluting

[Wilson Gray]

On Aug 2, 2004, at 3:47 PM, James A. Landau wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at AOL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: The history of saluting
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> In a message dated  Fri, 30 Jul 2004 22:28:47 -0400. Wilson Gray
> <hwgray at EARTHLINK.NET> writes:
>
>>> when, two centuries later,
>>> Clausewitz said "War is a continuation of policy by other means", no
>>> one
>>> laughed.
>>
>>  It's nice to see "Politik" translated correctly for a change!:-)
>
> My copy of Clausewitz has gone AWOL (combat fatigue, I believe) so I
> was
> unable to check the text.  I had to quote from memory and may have
> misquoted.
>
> Let's see now.  Politics is the art of getting other people to do what
> you
> want them to.  In the Clausewitz context, "politics" means the process
> of
> getting the State to agree on a policy,and "policy" means what the
> State decided to
> do once the politics subsided.
>
> So, rendering Clausewitz's quote as "War is a continuation of
> politics..."
> implies that a decision to go to war is the result not of a deliberate
> State
> decision but rather is the result of the squabbles and intrigues that
> led up to
> making a decision.  Hmm.\
>
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> Another take on saluting.  An anthropologist might identify saluting
> as a
> typical primate dominance ritual, in which case you can say that the
> origin of
> saluting goes back to prehistoric times and in fact to before the
> emergence of
> Homo sapiens!
>
> Still another, and more likely, take:  A random officer and a random
> enlisted
> man meet by chance in public.  What are they to do?  Ignore each other?
> Never.  Shake hands?  No, too civilian.  Saluting grew up as a ritual
> greeting,
> and in fact the US Army refers to it as "the greeting of the day."
>
> In the saluting ritual US Army-style, the enlisted man salutes and
> says,
> "Good morning, sir" (or "afternoon" or whatever).  The officer returns
> the salute
> and says "Good mroning."  Note that the major asymmetry in the ritual
> is not
> the salute itself (which the officer also performs), but the fact that
> the
> enlisted man has to use the word "Sir".

There is, for officers, a catch to this that mean EM have been known to
take advantage of. That is, there's also a major *symmetry* in that,
just as an EM is obligated to render a salute to an officer, so also is
that officer obligated to *return* the salute. It was considered great
fun to catch an officer with, e.g. a double armload of groceries and
salute him, thereby forcing him to put down his groceries and assume
the position of attention in order to return the salute. If the bags of
groceries spilled all over the ground, so much the better.

-Wilson Gray

>
> I should note another US Army custom:  a newly commissioned officer
> gives a
> dollar bill to the first enlisted man ever to salute him.
>
>      - James A. Landau
>