This may come as a shock to you, but there is a massive difference between pedantry and simply saying ‘this person is making an accusation. They got to choose the words they used, and what accusation they were making. How about we believe they’re not complete morons, and used the words they intended to use, rather than come up with a whole host of denials that all come down to accusing them of being so stupid that they used exactly the wrong terms’.
If, for example, I accuse Harkon of being a “cat burglar”, rather than just ‘a thief’, then I’m indicating a specific type of activity, and a specific method for carrying that activity out: illegal entry, but through stealth and finesse, not brute force. I’m not going to use that term if, for example, he’d come up to me, put a gun to my back, and said ‘gimme your wallet’. If I do, well, I’m dumb.
Now, let’s say Lady Cerra hadn’t just said ‘sleeper agent’, but had gone on to say that the putative agent had arrived at the Holding after Harkon’s statement about ‘unleashing operatives’ in Huola. If I’d gone and taken her to task about how that describes an infiltrator, rather than a sleeper agent, that would be pedantry. Instead, I’m simply taking her at her word, and trusting her and her security forces to know which freaking term they wanted to use.
Her. Not you. Are you a mind-reader? Do you have specific evidence to show that she didn’t mean that word? Or are you just knee-jerking a defense of her because you like her for taking in the refugees? I would think that, as someone interested in their well-being, you’d have an interest in seeing her evidence, in getting hard proof that she didn’t just pick one of them and murder him as a warning to U’K to not even try to get someone into her Holding.
So: Do you? Or are you simply taking her at her word? If it were me, and I felt a responsibiity to those people, I would sure as hell be making damned sure not a single one of them gets shot and used for propaganda without a cubic kilometer of hard evidence.
And for the record? This is what pedantry looks like. Disputing a third-party’s insistence of ‘she totally didn’t mean the thing she actually said’ when she herself has not made any statement to that effect? That isn’t. That’s just calling you an apologist idiot.
Idiot.