First Gentleman

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I am Sarah. I’m calling from San Diego.

Oh, welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Thank you. I’m originally from Ethiopia, and I have a timely question for you.

Okay.

What would be a title for Bill Clinton if Hillary Clinton is elected president? How do you call him? What would you call Bill Clinton? What would his title be if Hillary Clinton is elected president?

That is a timely question. That’s a good question.

Do you have suggestions for us?

In my native language, as far as I know, we don’t have this term. You know, I believe that a society coins a term when it corresponds with reality.

Yeah, that’s right.

When we need a word, we make it.

That’s why I’m calling. Because this has come up before. This has come up the last time Hillary Clinton ran. It comes up just as an idle question pretty much every four years. Now we are deep into the 2016 race. Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the Democratic candidate. And we have a problem.

There’s another problem with the Clintons, which is that Bill used to be president himself. So you can’t address them both. And informally, people still call him President Clinton, his last highest title. So we can’t actually still call him President Clinton if his wife is also President Clinton, right?

Typically, what comes out, almost everyone first thinks of first gentleman because gentleman corresponds pretty well to lady. It’s got a couple connotations that particularly given the sex scandals that he went through don’t really maybe apply to him. He’s not a certain kind of gentleman, but he is another kind of gentleman maybe.

Also, people have suggested for him, particularly this one man, first Bubba, because Bubba is a slang term for a good old boy or country boy in parts of the South. I used it when I was a kid to refer to my brother, Bubba. But that’s a joking one. You’ll never find that, say, engraved in a gold leaf document that is framed and put on the wall, First Bubba or anything like that.

In the Philippines, apparently, they do use First Gentleman, kind of quasi-formally. And another joke that Bill Clinton himself likes to tell, which I think is funny, particularly if he is speaking in the United Kingdom where the joke makes a lot more sense, he will joke that they would call him the first laddy, L-A-D-D-Y, because a laddy being a cute name for another fellow, a male friend.

Yeah, it’s very interesting, yeah. You know, Sarah Palin, when she was governor of Alaska, she called her husband the first dude.

First dude, yeah.

Yeah, so we’ve had all these joking answers, but we’ve never really had to address it seriously.

Not yet. When in doubt, it’s really interesting thing is even though the United States really tends toward jokes and hyperbole and we love innovating with language. I suspect that we will default to when we’re referring to them as a pair, the President Clinton and Mr. Clinton. And he will just simply be Mr. Clinton.

And the press can call him all the titles they want, but none of them will actually be formal. They can call him first gentleman. They can call him first laddie, first baba. But he will still just formally be Mr. Clinton when he is introduced, say, to another head of state alongside his wife.

Make sense, Sarah?

Wow.

Yes.

Very interesting.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling. Thank you for raising the question.

Take care.

Bye-bye, Sarah.

Bye.

We’re sure everyone else has a lot of suggestions. Every single time this comes up, the comments section and every newspaper are filled with a ton of genuine, heartfelt answers and a lot of goofy, jokey ones.

If you’ve got one, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.