Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
In his Oct. 23 letter to the editor, Jeffrey Duncan said: “`Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Teddy Roosevelt said it, and George W. Bush is doing it.” Interestingly (and ironically for the writer), the old West African adage favored by Roosevelt was meant to emphasize the “speak softly” and not the “big stick.”
Roosevelt was somewhat dismayed when, shortly after uttering the phrase at a whistle-stop speech on one leg of an eight-week trip, people were soon thereafter seen at the side of the tracks and at future whistle stops, symbolically waving sticks, clubs and bats of all sizes.
They got the intent of the adage wrong in the early 1900s, and people still get it wrong today.
