A small step and a giant leap

WE quote him all the time but many people don’t seem to realise that Neil Armstrong went all the way to the moon only to fluff his lines.

‘‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’’ he famously said, and his words continue to ring down through the ages. The only problem is that the sentence makes no sense whatsoever. What the first human being on the moon intended to say was: ‘‘One small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind.’’ But, in what was perhaps the most high-profile attack of stage fright ever suffered on live TV, Armstrong left out the crucial ‘a’ and simply wound up repeating himself.

The celebrated astronaut came to mind as I found myself pondering some slightly more mundane matters of language and expression recently. Consider ‘‘cross-channel’’, for example, a phrase still frequently used in this country to mean football in England. But across which Channel, exactly? France, via Dover? Or maybe the St George’s Channel? The latter is indeed the recognised name of a body of water between these two islands but, according to my in-depth research (thanks Google), it seems to be shrinking all the time.