‘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’.
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