Grammar Gaffes

In the interview with Geoff Pullum, he points out at the number of people in the world who care about English grammar. He is dismayed at people who often take extreme stances with respect to rules of the language. He points out that many of them are offended, take to arms, whenever they find any improper usage of grammar in public.

This interview made me recollect a famous incident that had fascinated me for a long time. It was about the phrase uttered by Neil Armstrong when he landed on the moon.

Neil Armstrong’s most famous line, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” had a grammatical error in it which was picked up by number of people in the English speaking countries The mistake was the missing article, ‘a’, in front of the word ‘man’ in the sentence. Without that, it read as if the word “ man” denoted the plurality of humankind and the two parts of the sentence did not have any difference.

Armstrong had himself pointed out that the sentence is meaningful only if he says, “That’s one small step for a man.”, thus signifying his individual achievement. He maintained that the missing “a” was lost in transmission. People have not been happy with this reasoning and experts have scrutinized the audio file of Armstrong’s historic transmission, searching for eviden eof the missing “a”.

Given the significance of this achievement in multiple dimensions, why did people pick up on grammar of the sentence?. I found this aspect very amusing. Having thought through it seriously, I can only reason that there are lot more people who can relate to the English language than landing on the moon. Thus felt right in pointing out the mistake if had truly occurred. To support this line of reasoning, I could think of Pablo Picasso, the renowned spanish painter, when he was asked his opinion on, a man landing on moon, he had famously said, “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.”