United States
There is an aristocratic tinge to the social usage of the title “colonel", which today designates the southern gentleman, and is archetypal of the southern aristocrat. States conferring this title as an honor include Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Alabama. In 2005 Illinois allowed for the Governor of the State to make appointments to the Governor's Regiment of Colonels, but no such appointments have been made. Many states have provisions in their articles or bills concerning state defense forces which allow the governor to grant honorary membership of the officer ranks. While the honorary colonel of this usage has no actual military role, the title did evolve from the military.
The highest honor of Tennessee is “Colonel, Aide de camp, Governor’s staff". Those who receive this award are recorded by the Secretary of State of Tennessee with those who have been commissioned into the State Guard and Tennessee National Guard. This distinction went to only American citizens or Tennessee residents until Governor Phil Bredesen awarded it to the first non American, a Canadian, Cory Ward Dingle of British Columbia for his contributions to the People of Tennessee.
Kentucky’s famous colonelcy evolved from the personal bodyguards of the governor and now confers its recipients as honorary members of the governor’s staff. Like Tennessee, Georgia’s honorary titles give its members a rank as Aides-de-camp to the Governor's staff and is codified in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated 38-2-111, while the Alabama honor specifically makes one a lieutenant colonel in the state militia.
The Colonel is also often a shorthand reference to Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, who was an honorary Kentucky colonel. Another famous "colonel" was "Colonel Tom Parker", the manager of Elvis Presley whose title was granted by Jimmie Davis, the governor of Louisiana.
Read more about this topic: Colonel (title)
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—’indoctrination’ we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)