The one you prepare.

The one you give.

And the one you wish you had given.

We are safe assuming those are still his words though, yes? That’s how I interpret this.

Good luck ferreting that out, dear ferrets!

As long as it worked out the way it did, it doesn’t matter to me that the line is missing from the oral delivery — printed speeches in Conference reports and elsewhere (um, Congressional Record, anyone?) are seldom a verbatim record of the happenings at a meeting. This is how President Brown wanted his speech to stand, so there it is. (Not that I’m not curious as to how and why this came about, but ultimately it doesn’t matter.)

But if I look at the different versions of the King Follett Discourse of Joseph Smith, we have a much more complicated situation determining what was said and meant. It’s not so easy to parse the details there in the absence of a recording, or of an edited transcript approved by Joseph Smith and published concurrently.

Thanks for pointing this out, Gary. I was not aware of the difference between the talk as presented and the talk as printed.

Maybe he remembered as he stood there in the Field House that he had to have lunch with President Wilkinson shortly afterwards, and didn’t want to get him too riled up.

(And I’m wondering what I thought was so important about my trigonometry class at Provo High, just across the street, that I didn’t cut class to go hear Pres. Brown.)

#4 Re: The Eloquent President as being “a very good read for anyone who thinks that they might ever need to speak in public.” That would be pretty much every member of the Church, right? . . . says the fellow who was asked to speak in Sacrament Meeting in a few weeks . ..

The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through his Words (Ronald White, Jr., 2005) is an exploration of Lincoln’s speeches: the writing, the delivery, and the subsequent editing for publication. If you’re interested in the difference between spoken and written words, that is a fascinating look at the topic, and a very good read for anyone who thinks that they might ever need to speak in public.

The last time I spoke, the previous speaker ended five minutes before the meeting was supposed to end. Normally I would have cut my talk to from the 15 to 20 minutes I was asked to prepare to five minutes, but darn it, I prayed long and hard over the talk and had had strong impressions about what the members of the ward needed to hear (grief and mourning and depression and the plan of salvation and the resurrection), so I cut as much as I could cut and still say something cohesive, and the last five minutes of the talk I listened for the rise in noise that means that people are done with the meeting, done with the speakers, and poking their kids to prompt them to interrupt the speaker. The noise level never rose, so I finished the talk in ten minutes. (And then spent the hour during Sunday School talking with people who approached me, needing to discuss the subject further.)

That’s a long way to say that the printed version of my talk was much different than what I actually said. I left out half of the material and added a couple of lines while I was speaking. If I was given to publishing my sacrament meeting talks, that talk would read quite differently than what the congregation heard.