"a day that will live in infamy" (in a positive way)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Oct 5 03:03:20 UTC 2012


On Oct 4, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> Just two corrections (to the Subject line, which perhaps is not
> Mark's invention) -- Roosevelt said (and apparently drafted, from the
> facsimile) "date which", not "day that".

It was my subject line, and I was quoting Bobby Ojeda (see below), not FDR.  The point that the original version had "which" (and "date"), rather than "that" (and "day"), came up in the earlier thread, but  Bobby O. is hardly alone in misremembering it.

LH
>
> As far as I'm concerned, his "which" is correct.  ("December 7, 1941,
> a date" is unique, and so does not need a restrictive "that"
> clause.)  They knew how to teach English at Groton, and if the
> students didn't learn they would be corrected at Harvard.  But then,
> I'm a prescriptivist.
>
> Joel
>
>
> At 10/4/2012 09:13 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>
>> Coming *very* late to the party, with a book on my table whose frontispiece
>> is Roosevelt's hand-edited typescript of that address. (*White House
>> Ghosts: Presidents and their Speechwriters*. *From FDR to George W.
>> Bush. *Robert
>> Schlesinger. 2008.)
>>
>> Pp. 26-27. Roosevelt dictates to his secretary, Grace Tully:
>>
>> > "Yesterday -- comma -- December 7 -- comma -- 1941 -- comma -- a date
>> > which will live in world history -- comma -- the United States of America
>> > was simultaneously and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the
>> > Empire of Japan -- period." Later, going over the draft, Roosevelt made a
>> > handful of changes, scratching out "world history," for example, for
>> > "infamy."
>> >
>>
>> "Simultaneously" to "suddenly" is also in the hand corrections in the
>> frontispiece.
>>
>> Mark Mandel
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>>
>> > According to Bobby Ojeda, announcer and himself former New York Mets
>> > pitcher, on the Mets' post-game show tonight, that's the legacy of
>> > tonight's game, after Johan Santana completed the first no-hitter in the
>> > 50-year history of the Mets.  Nothing infamous (in the traditional sense)
>> > about the game or the day; it's just a bleaching, like that of "notorious"
>> > = 'famous', facilitated of course by the FDR tag line for Pearl Harbor, but
>> > unlike Bobby O., Roosevelt really *meant* it back in Dec. '41.
>> >
>> > LH
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> >
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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