A Small, Belated Step for Grammarians – The New York Times

An Australian computer programmer says he found the missing “a” from Neil Armstrong’s famous first words from the moon in 1969, when the world heard him say, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” …

Some historians and critics have dogged Mr. Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, “One small step for a man.” Without the missing “a,” critics say, Mr. Armstrong said the equivalent of “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”

Is this really that big a deal? “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind” would be just a poetic in its own right. It still means that one particular thing is both a small step and a giant leap.

(This concludes the least consequential blog post ever.)