A senior White House aide sprang to the defense of President George W. Bush's grammar today, accusing the media of being "hypercritical" in parsing and picking apart his words.
Mr Bush's occasional creative use of the English language was well documented during the election campaign and his move to the White House has intensified the scrutiny, leading to some widely publicised syntactical slips this week.
"They (Americans) don't care what you think about his grammar, they care about what he's going to do that affects their lives," Ms Mary Matalin, an assistant to Mr Bush, said in a CNN television interview.
After watching videotaped excerpts from Mr Bush's Thursday news conference, his first formal White House session with the media since taking office on January 20th, Ms Matalin bristled at an interviewer's suggestion that the public might expect more from their president than a third-grade grammatical error.
Discussing the invitation he and Mrs Laura Bush extended to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Mr Bush told reporters: "Laura and I are looking forward to having a private dinner with he and Mrs Blair Friday night."
Earlier, Bush seemed unable to choose between singular and plural as a set of pesky pronouns tripped him up.
Asked what advice he would give politically active members of his family, Bush replied: "My guidance to them is, behave yourself. And they will."
Although an official White House transcript of the 30-minute question-and-answer session rendered almost every word verbatim, it did not contain Mr Bush's inadvertent reference to cocoa - instead of coca - production in Colombia, a slip that gave rise to a host of jokes.
"I think the media handled it with good humour," White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer quipped to reporters.
His pun was too subtle for most. Good Humour is the name of a popular chocolate ice cream bar.
The media's Bushism watch went on high alert earlier this week when the president delivered the line, "You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test" at an education event in Tennessee.
The slip was reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the country. NBC's late-night television host Jay Leno awarded it The George W. Bush Quote of the Day.