Exposed!: Famous ungrammatical quotes!

[Laurence Horn]

On Apr 24, 2013, at 1:52 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> 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.

In the context, it is indeed a mistake, or rather a "mistake", to the same extent as #2 (beginning a sentence with a conjunction) or #4 (ending one with a preposition), i.e. a violation of of an arbitrary and irrational edict that (or which) was never really followed but has nevertheless been insisted on by a significant group of "authorities".  What I trotted out FDR's line as was a nice example of, as Harbeck puts it, a "grammatical superstition".

LH

> "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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>> >
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>>
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>
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