If your worst fear is standing in front of an audience and speaking then spare a thought for these people. They not only made famous speeches, they also gave us some of the most famous and infamous mistakes in public speeches ever.
Who Made These Infamous Mistakes in Public Speeches?
There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again’ – George W Bush
The former US president was so fond of making terrible mistakes in public speeches that some cruel and frankly heartless people call mistakes like this Bushisms. This one is an absolute classic, including geographical confusion at the start, a stumbling middle bit and then an end that just kind of tails off limply.
I Actually Did Vote for the $87 Billion Before I Voted Against It- John Kerry
Oh dear, this flip flopping statement in 2004 quite possibly put the final in the coffin of Kerry’s presidential hopes. He was talking about his vote to increase the budget for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and how he voted for it before voting against it. As mistakes in public speeches go, there were no grammatical errors but the sentiments it show weren’t exactly inspiring.
Too Much Crying – Gwyneth Paltrow
It’s not just politicians then can make asses of themselves in public. Just watch any randomly chosen film awards ceremony if you don’t believe me on that one. I have only seen images of Gwyneth Paltrow accepting an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love once in my life. That was once too much. My toes still curl inwards on an involuntary basis when I think about just how many flaming tears she shed that awful night. The only time I have seen someone cry more than that was when I was about 8 and I discovered that the Smurfs weren’t real people.
One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind – Neil Armstrong
I was hoping to mention JFK and jelly doughnuts at some point but I just discovered that Ich Bin Ein Berliner was actually technically correct for what he wanted to say. The “I am a jelly doughnut” thing is basically just another big fat urban legend. In that case, I’m going to have to take issue with the first man to walk on the Moon instead. It’s a great speech but what does it even mean? Isn’t one small step for “a man” what he wanted to say, as “man” and “mankind” are really the same? Armstrong said that he did say the “a” and that it wasn’t picked up by his microphone.
The Mokusatsu Word – President Suzuki
When the Allied forces demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan in 1945, the Japanese president replied with a press conference in which he used the world mokusatsu. The mistake in this case is that he used an ambiguous word that can be interpreted in a number of ways. For example, it could mean silent contempt or to kill with silence but it could also mean letting a subject die by simply not doing anything more about it. The response was translated in the most aggressive way and just days later the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by atomic bombs. We`ll never know what would have happened if he had used a less ambiguous word.
