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

[Joel S. Berson]

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".

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
> >
>
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