Bare with Me

I'm not one of those grammar-correctors. You know, the people who go all prim and proper on you and say "It's not "Can I go to the bathroom?" it's "May I go to the bathroom?" or who send you back the letter you wrote them with red pen markings where your grammatical and spelling errors are.

I actually find those people very annoying. Currently, there's a kid in my class who goes around correcting everyone's grammar and pronunciation as they are speaking throughout the day, and sometimes I feel like shaking him. Either that or asking him if he got a perfect score on his ACT.

Okay, most of the time I'm really good but I still laugh about the time he told me that he thought "No Loitering" and "No Littering" meant the same thing, because they sounded the same, they were just spelled a little differently. 

 

I know English grammar, and spelling, very well. The most thrilling job I've ever had was when I graded papers for a busy professor when I was in college. But I choose not to correct the speech of people around me. I'm fundamentally opposed to it, for one thing, because I believe that spoken English need not follow all the rules laid out in our high school textbooks. Any language, when spoken or written informally, should have a little more color to it than the textbooks allow. For the second reason, I've spent a large part of my life around non-native English speakers. I'm even married to one! Most of the time, non-native English speakers aren't going to speak as correctly or as naturally as a native speaker does, and that's okay! You know what, I'm impressed with everyone who learns English as a 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th language. It's a hard language to speak, and learning any languages as an adult is difficult. I'm okay with the errors a non-native speaker makes, and unless I'm in a teaching position, or if they've specifically asked me to help them with their English, I'm not going to correct them, instead, I'm going to choose to understand their meaning even if they don't have the right words.

Few things irritate me more than native English speakers who stubbornly refuse to understand broken or strongly accented English. I choose to understand, or seek to understand when it's difficult, because Mandarin Chinese is my 2nd language and Spanish is my 3rd. I'm not fluent in either. My tones in Chinese are a little sketchy sometimes and, in the heat of the moment, I usually start putting all of my Spanish verbs in the present tense. But I know I appreciate it when the native speakers I talk to don't laugh at me or act like they can't understand anything I've said because I made a few mistakes.

However, even though I don't correct other people's speech. I feel there is one thing I need to address. I have seen this phrase so often on so many people's blogs: "Bare with me."

And it always makes me giggle. I do not usually have a childish sense of humor, but I can't seem to help it in this case. The sheer frequency of this phrase makes me think that the meaning of it is not commonly known among bloggers. "Bare with me", at least to me, implies being bare with someone....as in not wearing any clothes with someone. The term most bloggers are searching for is "bear with me," as in, perhaps, bear with me the burden of this long explanation in my blog post.

So, for future reference, you'll almost never run into a situation where you need to write "bare with me," though you may find plenty of uses for "bear with me."