Recall the shameful misquote on the Martin Luther King memorial sculpture that was unveiled to much fanfare back in September? Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has announced that it will definitely be "fixed," and Washington Post reporter Rachel Manteuffel, who broke the story, has written a smarmy self-congratulatory followup with a very rosy tone. I was pleased, on reading the headline, that the issue was finally being dealt with, as I and many others had called for.
But on reading further, I found it's not being dealt with properly. Not at all. Salazar is only passing along the promise of the memorial's chief architect that the misquote will be replaced by an "alternative wording," by which he seems to mean a more accurate paraphrase of what King actually said (and ergo, another misquote). The nominal reason is that the full quote could not be fit retroactively on the slab of granite where it now resides without destroying the monument.
I find that a rather dubious excuse. First, officials of the Foundation that funded the memorial are even now admitting that the shortening of King's words occurred only because the sculptor (Chinese) and the architect thought a shorter quote looked better aesthetically -- NOT because they didn't think there was room for it. Second, if you look at the expanse of surface available on the monument, it certainly looks as if there's space enough to put the entire Constitution of the United States. (Photo below is the Washington Post's)
So once again it appears that we'll settle for a compromise that entirely overlooks the main point: this is history, and a quote should be exactly that, not a paraphrase. I think this monument, and therefore the memorial of which it is a part, is destined to be an object of ridicule for a long time to come; not of King, but of our country's cavalier approach to language, education, and history.
(An interesting sidelight on our teaching of these things is that the Post's writer, explaining the real meaning of the remark, says that it was originally in the "conditional tense" -- another goof, because "conditional" is not grammatically a tense, but a mode, also sometimes referred to as mood.)
It's unfortunate that we find ourselves in this mess, thanks to an architect and a sculptor, neither of whom seemed to have much sense of history. The quote itself isn't a particularly good one anyway -- it's long and not especially memorable -- so I'd suggest the right solution is not to re-paraphrase it, but to substitute a different one. Perhaps it would even be one that "looks right."
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