Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
It’s one of the great bloopers of history. Neil Armstrong meant to say: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”
What the listening millions on Earth heard was: “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” He blew the first words said by man on extraterrestrial soil. All that Nasa preparation, and they forgot the voice coach. If ever you wanted an example of the importance of the littlest bits of speech, that’s it. Written in the stars.
Now, it seems, cutting-edge technology has exonerated Armstrong from his lunar fluff. He did, we are informed, insert the indefinite article — but so rapidly that it got lost in the white noise.
The sad thing is, when it comes to (mis)quotes, we often stubbornly prefer the fabrication, or distortion, over the real thing. As the Italians say, “Se e non vero, e ben trovato.” Translation: it may not be true, but, Goddammit, I like it.
(On the right) George W Bush’s quote is the genuine one. You can hear it, live, on Neil Young’s Let’s Impeach the President, along with the original quotation in which Bush did assert there was a link. No computer programmer can get him out of that.
The technology that has excavated the missing syllable from Armstrong’s quote, could, with no trouble at all, insert it audibly into the acoustic record. And school history books could amend their texts to read what the astronaut meant to say and now, as we know, did. Should we do it?
I think not; any more than lovers of Robert Louis Stevenson’s work would want the misquotation on his gravestone in Samoa chiselled out. It’s from his own poem, Requiem. Whoever did the engraving inserted a “the” before “sea” in the lines:
Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
One can see why. “From sea” is awkward. But if it’s there, leave it. It’s human error. The great painters of the Renaissance, legend has it, would insert mistakes into their designs, as an act of humility. There’s something reassuringly human in the fact that “mankind” can project itself into the heavens, but the guy carrying the flag can’t get his lines quite right. It’s a case of the misquote being ben trovato.
— The Guardian
