Exposed!: Famous ungrammatical quotes!

[Laurence Horn]

On Apr 24, 2013, at 11:28 AM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:

> Very interesting, Jon.  If one includes the restrictive "that" vs. "which" controversy (American copyeditors see their main function in life as changing restrictive "which" to "that," but I believe that in Britain the preference is the reverse), many of the most famous literary quotations seem "wrong" to literary Americans.
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For that one, one could do worse that to trot out that FDR speech we discussed not that long ago, re "December 7, 1941, a date [not 'day'] which [not 'that'] will live in infamy".  The photostat of the original text, with annotations, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Infamy-address-1.gif shows that Roosevelt had wavered about "infamy" (originally appeared as "world history") but not about the "which" (or the "date").

LH
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>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Jonathan Lighter [wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 9:58 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Exposed!: Famous ungrammatical quotes!
>
> http://news.yahoo.com/9-famous-quotes-technically-grammatically-incorrect-065300736.html
>
> You will be shockedshocked.
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
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