‘Bear with me,’ said my husband on the phone and then let out a loud roar. It was intended to be the sound of the bear with him. There are no circumstances in which that would be amusing.
It is bad enough when people say ‘Bear with me’ and then spend unfathomable minutes trying to find your ‘details’. I can’t bear being asked to be borne with. It is even worse when the bearing falls into the growing category of difficulty with verbs: sitting and sat; brought and bought; lie and lay.
The Sun carried a news story recently about a television presenter called Carol Kirkwood, who took her colleagues’ failings ‘in her stride and bared no grudge against her co-stars’. One can bare one’s teeth, but it comes to something if one inadvertently writes bared for bore.
In one of those helpful online writing blogs, Allison Bressmer, ‘a professor of freshman composition and critical reading’, declares: ‘Bear and bare share pronunciations and include the same letters. It’s no wonder they cause confusion.’ Well, I don’t know. Do people confuse tied and tide, or grate and great – ‘Make America grate again’?
But then, her blog says, if Professor Bressmer ‘isn’t writing or teaching, you’ll likely find her reading a book or listening to a podcast while happily sipping a semi-sweet iced tea’. I’m not sure about semi-sweet iced tea, but I’m discouraged by likely used as an adverb. The Professor is an interesting guide to usage. ‘You’ve probably heard the phrases “bare naked”, “I bared my soul”,’ she writes. The soul, yes, but not bare naked. Perhaps it is an American idiom. If so, it is not one the Oxford English Dictionary has caught up with. It includes an accidental juxtaposition of bare and naked in a quotation from 1823 illustrating the phrase nude contract: ‘a bare naked contract, without a consideration, which is void in law’.
There’s also the almost arbitrary distinction between borne and born. If you have borne with everyone patiently, you may wish you had never been born.
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