Bloomberg's headline on Wednesday: "Iran, Oman Reach Agreement on Proposed Strait of Hormuz Shipping Route." Two countries, one verb, no attribution — the grammar of a thing that happened. Now look at the web address that story lives at: iran-says-agreement-on-hormuz-shipping-route-reached-with-oman. And look at the version that went out to syndication, still sitting on Yahoo Finance: "Iran Says Agreement on Hormuz Shipping Route Reached With Oman." Somewhere between the first draft and the front page, two words got tidied away. They were the two doing the most work. * Background, one sentence, because you can get it anywhere: the Strait of Hormuz has been throttled since the US and Israel struck Iran in February, and Tehran and Muscat are negotiating a route arrangement that would let commercial shipping through again. * So what is the actual evidence behind the verb "reach"? Per Bloomberg's own copy: Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told reporters, in remarks posted to Telegram, that a joint statement is "under review and in the final drafting stage," that talks are "forward-moving," and that a deal would be struck "if certain third parties do not obstruct this process." Under review. Final drafting. If nobody obstructs. That is one government's spokesman describing a document that has not been signed, with a condition attached to the end of it — and the headline above it says the two countries reached an agreement. * Everybody else kept their hands where you could see them. NPR: "Iran says it is close to reaching agreement with Oman to reopen Strait of Hormuz" — attribution intact, plus "close to," which is the honest distance. Al Jazeera went with "Iran, Oman, US 'close' to Hormuz deal" and put quote marks around close, which is a newsroom pointing at a word and saying: not ours. CNN skipped the confidence question and reframed the whole thing around Washington's mood — "An agreement on the Strait of Hormuz is taking shape, but not one Trump wants." * This matters more at Bloomberg than almost anywhere else, and Bloomberg knows it better than anyone. Its readers are people with money in the water. Barely 24 hours ago we wrote about a rally built on Iran talks that Iran itself was publicly denying — a thousand points of Dow moving on a frame. On a terminal, the difference between "Iran says a deal is close" and "Iran and Oman reach agreement" is not a stylistic preference. It's the product. * And then the tell. On Thursday, Bloomberg's next headline on the same story read: "Iran Says Deal With Oman on Strait of Hormuz Agreed in Principle." The attribution is back. So is a hedge — in principle. Nobody called it a correction, because technically nothing was corrected. The house just quietly returned to the caution it had started with, one day and one headline later. * The funny part is that the careful version was written first. It is right there in the URL, fossilised, where the copy desk can't reach it. Somebody typed "Iran says," and somebody decided the sentence read better without a source. It does read better. That's the problem.