One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,â€? they heard him say as he dropped from the ladder of his spacecraft to make the first human footprint on the lunar surface. But from the moment he said it, and for 37 years since, debate has raged over whether the Nasa astronaut might have fluffed his lines. Mr Armstrong has long insisted that he meant to say “one small step for a man . . .â€? — which would have been a more meaningful and grammatically correct version, free of tautology. But even the astronaut himself could not be sure. ... Now, after almost four decades, the spaceman has been vindicated. Using high-tech sound analysis techniques, an Australian computer expert has rediscovered the missing “aâ€? in Mr Armstrong’s famous quote. Peter Shann Ford ran the Nasa recording through sound-editing software and clearly picked up an acoustic wave from the word “aâ€?, finding that Mr Armstrong spoke it at a rate of 35 milliseconds — ten times too fast for it to be audible.

Of course, upon reflection, "One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind" makes no sense. However, the sense and sentiment of the sentence is so clear that most people who grew up with it never realize its 'logical shortcoming'. This is similar to 'I could care less' vs. 'I couldn't care less'. I first heard about this on the Buzz Out Loud podcast where all hosts agreed that the 'correct' version "One small step for a man..." sounded strange and somehow detracted from the meaning. Of course, popular culture is not the only place where such missteps persists. In his great book on logic for linguists, James McCawley talks about the sentence "Man walks" as a 'real' language translation of the simple predicate walk(man). However, "Man walks" doesn't really exist as a legitimate English sentence. There is only one obscure context in which it makes sense (so obscure, I can't recall it now).

Aside from the trivia value, however, this is also potentially an interesting example of local grammar. Albeit, an extreme one. In all three of these cases, a local grammar exists that allows us not only to interpret the statement but also analyze it. Rather than dismissing this is an exception or an error that millions of gullible speakers let slip, we can integrate it much more successfully into the realm on the English language.

Of course, it is also not insignificant that somebody took the time to re-analyze this sentence.