Did We Mishear Neil Armstrong? | Hacker News Reader

Did We Mishear Neil Armstrong?

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I watched the Apollo 11 documentary from this year that was made with the recently recovered audio and video (it was great!). I had no idea that Armstrong was talking to mission control the entire time he was exiting the lunar module and climbing down the ladder. He then paused, made his famous quote, paused again, and started talking to mission control again about the lunar surface.

Whether he misspoke or we misheard him is irrelevant to me. I think it's pretty clear that "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" is the sentiment he meant to convey to all people that were listening.

It always seemed to me that the long pauses between "man... one... giant leap" are consistent with him realising that he made a mistake (dropped the word "a"), and then deciding to just go ahead.

I agree he didn't say the "a" and your explanation is something I hadn't thought of before.

In any case if Neil has really said "for a man" everyone at NASA publicity would have been quick to put out an announcement but the "controversy" was much later than the actual landing so it seems to me someone (Neil perhaps) is trying to "correct" history.

Frankly I like it the original way regardless if it's not syntactically correct. We've found out subsequent to the landing all of the problems and even almost disasters and we still successfully landed and returned.

I think it's a testament to the human spirit - we make mistakes and still accomplish our goals.

No, he did not make a mistake. You are just not used to his accent. Americans do have accents, and they differ from place to place. No one from where he comes from makes this mistake.

Now that you know better, you can avoid making it again.

Maybe it's having been born and raised in the midwest, but I pretty clearly hear 'for a man.' That's how I would say it, more like 'foruh' than 'for a'. As the article points out, it's rather hard to tell the difference in the two because overpronouncing the ending 'r' of a word naturally makes the same sort of sound. But, based on how we typically talk, 'for a ' would sound like an overpronounced 'for' with an emphasis on the 'r', whereas 'for' would end more with an 'r' sound without a trailing 'uh'.

This.

"Fra" is just how "for a" is pronounced where Armstrong comes from.

Insisting one knows better than the speaker is not legitimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision

Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.

If I hear "One small step for a man", I also hear "One giant leap for a mankind".

This is not unique to hearing. A large number of famous quotes are not exactly as uttered or written originally.

We doctor up the quotes to make them more pithy or sound nicer, and everyone goes along, until it becomes canonized and no longer changeable.

In this case no correction is needed. He said it correctly, many heard it incorrectly. You can correct your misapprehension at any point, such as now.

that's pronounced "mee-sheer"

If you listen to the audio he probably did say it, but it appears to be audio that is consistent with a type of McGurk effect where you can change what you hear based on what you are thinking.

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