Hope and Fail

Resolute? Resolution? It’s not like there’s history involved

President Obama misspoke after a sound tech dumped a glass of water on his desk in the Elliptical … er … Oval Office, misstating the name of the desk he sits behind every day.

From the Associated Press:

Hustling into place, a sound technician working for the foreign press knocked over a glass of water on President Barack Obama’s desk on Friday with the long handle of the boom microphone she was carrying. The mishap splashed water across Obama’s famous but mostly empty desk.

The whack of the glass against the desk startled Obama, who didn’t see what happened. He was across the room with Zimbabwe’s prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, getting ready to talk to the media at an event known in White House parlance as, fittingly enough, a pool spray.

“Uh oh,” Obama said as staff members rushed to sop up the spill.

“All right,” Obama said with a smile. “It’s the Resolution Desk. It’s only like 100 years old.”

You can almost hear the sarcasm in the president’s voice when he says, “It’s only, like, 100-years-old.” But more than that, he got the name of the famous desk wrong.

It’s called the Resolute Desk, named after the British ship HMS Resolute. The U.S. found the wreckage of the ship, which Queen Victoria had fashioned into a desk and presented to President Hayes as a gift in 1880 (which makes it only, like, 129 years old).