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

[Mark Mandel]

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
>

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