Exposed!: Famous ungrammatical quotes!

[Joel S. Berson]

Yes, we have discussed it.  And I demonstrated (or did I merely
claim, and was dismissed as pretentious?) that FDR was
grammatical.  So please don't trot it out as a mistake (or is it just
being presented as an instance of controversy?), but rather as a
correct and educated use.  "Date" is specific -- there can be only
one "December 7, 1941" -- so he did not need any restrictive
clause.  He is using a relative clause -- it is also a date "which
will live in infamy."  So the dashes -- acting as commas -- are
proper.  (Although revisionists might argue that he was finessing the
comma controversy, by changing the typed commas into dashes.  Or
perhaps he was signaling to himself that he wanted a pause when
speaking.  This is the first time I've seen the MS; previously I'd
merely "heard" commas.)

Joel

At 4/24/2013 11:55 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>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.
> >
> >
>
>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
> >
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > 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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> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
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> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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