So apparently something hit the fan this week at the G8 summit.

But can we ignore for a moment the terrible fact that President Bush used a mild expletive (come on, folks! You want a sign of the guy’s humanity? Here it is. He cursed. Mildly.). Perhaps, instead, we could address the hearing difficulties of whoever translated the conversation…

First of all, there is the issue of irony.

Transcript according to CNN and CBS:

"See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over"

Transcript according to the British media (The Times, etc):

You see, the thing is, what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over"

Spot the difference? Okay, this may be a little pedantic, but since the media has exploded about this, and since The Times has a long diatribe about this one sentence, I think we can afford to be nitpicky here. Besides, there is a clear difference in meaning.

The second sentence implies that the “they” Bush refers to are idiots who have not grasped how simple this solution is. “The thing is, they just have to do this simple thing… duh!”

The first sentence is about the irony of the situation. Irony, meaning “the difference between how you might expect something to be and how it actually is” (Longman dictionary – see, I’m being precise here). The irony here is that there would be such a simple solution but it is not really that simple.

I’m hardly sticking up for Bush, here. But if the British media want to crucify him for something, they need to at least be accurate.

And that’s not the end of it.

How about this sentence from an opinion piece by Magnus Linklater in The Times today:

Mr Bush refers to the Syrian leader, possibly sarcastically, as “sweet,” while Mr Blair prefers “honey” — these are insider terms that required definition.

Yes… they do require definition…

This is just one example of a handful of articles I have read today ridiculing Bush and Blair’s use of the terms “sweet” and “honey” to refer to an unnamed man (who could be Kofi Annan or the Syrian leader or even Putin). The CNN & CBS and other American news sources I have found do not transcribe this part of the conversation. The Times and Sky News and pretty much every other transcript I can find from Britain transcribes it like this:

Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way...

Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet.

Blair: He is honey. And that’s what the whole thing is about. It’s the same with Iraq.

I thought this was rather odd. So I listened to the video footage of the conversation (see the CNN Web site). They say no such thing. What they actually say is:

Bush: Yeah, yeah, he’s through.

Blair: He’s had it.

So for all those journalists busy writing opinion pieces about “sweet-talk” and “drips with honey” – listen to the conversation and stop reading the transcripts.

Actually, for all those journalists writing opinion pieces about the conversation, we’ve had enough. Write about something more worthwhile. It was a quick conversation. It was not meant to be overheard. It’s interesting and amusing in that it gives us an insight into these two characters, but it is not breaking world news.

Take this, for example, from the same opinion article in The Times:

"There is something shallow and simplistic about their world view. Neither gives any indication that they are pursuing a dynamic or creative approach to solving the current crisis, and policy seems to consist of a few half-formed ideas spun out at random… Is this the limit of what the President of the United States feels able to suggest?

The conversation lasts about two minutes. The President is eating (with his mouth full, which is rather unpleasant) his lunch. Don’t you think it’s rather narrow-minded to assume that this conversation indicates the “limit,” the full extent of these two men’s thoughts or responses to the crisis?

So here’s my two cents (which may be worthless if a new bill passes to discontinue the penny): if you’re going to be pedantic, at least be pedantically accurate.