🇳🇱
Interesting fact of the day: The first words spoken on the moon was "That's one small step for _A_ man, one giant leap for man kind". However due to a misinterpretation he has always been consistently misquoted as saying "..one small step for man..."
@freemo What misinterpretation? I feel like the quote has always been interpreted as meaning "one small step for A man", since if you leave out the "a" the whole phrase doesn't make sense (since "man" and "mankind" are synonyms).
I thought that the main controversy was whether he misspoke (i.e. forgot to say "a"), the "a" was lost in static or possibly that in his accent "for a man" runs together and the "a" gets elided.
Someone (Peter Ford Shannon) wrote a paper about it, arguing that he indeed say "a"; the PDF is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20061123073155/http://www.controlbionics.com/images_EEPRa/Electronic%20Evidence%20and%20Physiological%20Reasoning%20Identifying%20Elusive%20Vowel-01%20Final.pdf
I'm not terribly convinced by the waveforms he shows, but it definitely feels plausible that the "a" gets elided when you say that phrase; without explicitly trying to enunciate the syllables, "for man" and "for a man" come out as sounding very similar when I try it.
@valleyforge @freemo They did, and he did mean to say "a", but I don't think that was ever the question.
I think the question was always whether he accidentally said "for man", flubbing his line.
@pganssle @freemo did no one ask him what he meant to say