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English has no handy term for what the French call it esprit de l'escalier, and the Germans know as treppenwitz: the wit of the staircase, those clever remarks or cutting rejoinders that only come to mind once it's too late for us to deliver them — literally, as we're headed down the stairs and out of the house. English also lacks an expression to describe the antithesis of treppenwitz, those occasions when one has a perfect remark carefully prepared in advance but fails to deliver it properly. If English did have such an expression, we could apply it to the words of the first man on the moon, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, who had the misfortune of misspeaking his scripted line during one of the most widely-viewed live broadcasts in television history. What Neil Armstrong meant to say as he descended from the ladder of Apollo 11's Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and stepped onto the lunar surface, thus becoming the first person ever to set foot on the moon, was That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind. Unfortunately, however, Armstrong flubbed his line in the excitement of the moment, omitting one small word (a) and delivering the line as That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind. The missing article made a world of difference in literal meaning, though — instead of a statement linking the small action of one man with a monumental achievement for (and by) all of humanity, Armstrong instead uttered a somewhat contradictory phrase that equated a small step by the human race with a momentous achievement by humankind (man and mankind having the same approximate meaning in English). Nonetheless, since the quote as actually spoken by Armstrong still sounded good, and most everyone understood the meaning he intended to convey, his words were widely repeated that day and have since joined the pantheon of the most well-known quotes in the English language. After the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth, Armstrong corrected his mistake (stating that he had been misquoted), and NASA obligingly provided the cover story that static had obscured the missing word: Press reporters, however, were more skeptical about what Armstrong had actually said: The New York Times clearly didn't buy the static explanation (hence the Whatever the reason ... introductory phrase in the final sentence of their article), and little detective work is necessary to reveal it as a face-saving fabrication: NASA's own recording of Armstrong's transmission from the lunar surface reveals that his words are clearly audible over the background static; that the word man follows immediately on the heels of for, with no gap between them into which Armstrong could conceivably have inserted the word a; and that Armstrong pauses noticeably after the word man, as he realizes he's flubbed his line and hesitates momentarily before completing it. In the years since that historic Apollo 11 mission, astronaut Armstrong has apparently reconciled himself to admitting that he did indeed misspeak his key line: Happily for Neil Armstrong, the tremendous scientific and cultural importance of his achievement dwarfed his minor verbal slip-up, and despite his failure to deliver his line as planned, it remains one of the world's most famous sentences. In September 2006, Peter Ford of Control Bionics announced he had analyzed the historic Apollo 11 recordings and claimed to have found a signature for the missing 'a, (supposedly spoken by Armstrong 10 times too quickly to be heard) but the results have not been validated by other audio analysts and have been criticized as simply interpreting ambiguous data to match a predetermined conclusion. As Rick Houston wrote in Footprints in the Dust, a history of the Apollo program: Additional information: Apollo 11 transcript
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