what's up gamers, i literally just now realized that the surgeon general and attorney general are two different jobs
Those words are also a remnant of England's administrative language once being Anglo-Norman French, which is why the noun and adjective are reversed. Like blood royal, lieutenant general, heir apparent, court martial, etc.
Also Anglo-Norman French and the influence of older Norman French pronunciation in general are the reason why British English pronunciations of French loanwords sound wrong to Americans (and probably the French)- they aren't intentionally fucking up the French pronunciation of "ballet" or whatever, it's just that they got the loanwords at an earlier time before the standardization of Modern French so they didn't adopt the modern pronunciations.