"In event of moon disaster" and other speeches our presidents never gave

Dennis Baron debaron at ILLINOIS.EDU
Sat Apr 25 05:19:29 UTC 2009


There's a new post on the Web of Language:

"In event of moon disaster" and other speeches our presidents never gave

When something’s in the offing and politicians have to give a speech  
about it, they may prepare for different outcomes by having a positive  
speech in one pocket and a negative speech in the other, just in case.

Two days before the first astronauts walked on the moon, H. R.  
“Watergate Bob” Haldeman directed Nixon speechwriter William Safire to  
come up with something for the president to say to the astronauts’  
widows. Just in case.

...

Other presidents had alternative speeches that they didn't give. Read  
about them in the rest of this post on the Web of Language:

http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage


____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

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