Pedants United

[MJMcCready]

'Black overtakes the initiative.'

That is a good one - I assume he meant "takes over", but it is complicated in other languages. What he said was quite poetic though.

He may have been reading old editions of Viz because in one of them it says 'It's best to remember chess is like a race. You have to overtake their bits before they overtake you.'

[MJMcCready]

Should 'balding' be considered as a verb? Bald is a noun.

[Roger de Coverly]

Should 'balding' be considered as a verb? Bald is a noun.

It's an adjective as in "a balding man". On the subject of hair, you might also write "a greying man".

[MJMcCready]

Hmmm, so then I think it's a ground.

[MJMcCready]

Hmmm, so then I think it's a gerund.

[MJMcCready]

Hmmm, so then I think it's a gerund.

[John Clarke]

Roger is right. Not every adjective that ends in "-ing" necessarily has to derive from a verb.

[MJMcCready]

That's true but not the norm.

[Kevin Thurlow]

I have just read a leaflet for some medicine and noted the comment, "The tablet can be divided into equal halves."

[Kevin Thurlow]

Classic bit of BBC sport reporting on website (on a pass from Trent Alexander Arnold)

"It didn't just split the Sheffield United defence in two, it literally dissected it."

It didn't "literally" do anything.

Cutting into two would be "bisecting", so they might have accidentally got that right...

[Neil Graham]

Classic bit of BBC sport reporting on website (on a pass from Trent Alexander Arnold)

"It didn't just split the Sheffield United defence in two, it literally dissected it."

It didn't "literally" do anything.

Cutting into two would be "bisecting", so they might have accidentally got that right...

Was this the same commentator who suggested a player "centred the ball into the middle"?

[Kevin Thurlow]

"Was this the same commentator who suggested a player "centred the ball into the middle"?"

Maybe, but the bad thing was that the example I cited was written. I can understand someone getting tangled in speech in the heat of the moment.

[Paul Habershon]

'Leela Chess Zero has been hunkering down since the opening, and Stockfish has lain(sic) siege.'

It seems churlish to pick on this extract from Luke McShane's excellent Spectator chess column. I think he is an outstanding chess journalist. Perhaps he is the victim of a rogue subeditor. Even so, such a small error does not spoil the chess content.

However, the pedant's thread began with my obsession about the verbs to lie and to lay. I think I am right in saying that the above should be 'laid siege'. 'Lain' is part of the intransitive 'lie' ('the barrels had lain in the cellar for several years'), whereas 'laid' is from the transitive 'lay' ('he laid the barrels in the in cellar'). It would be laying siege (direct object) not lying siege.

The problem is that 'lay' can also come from 'lie' ('the barrels lay in the cellar').

As I may have mentioned before, I do cringe at 'going for a lay-down or having a lay-in'. Lie, please!

[Kevin Thurlow]

A report on the "Pride of Britain" Awards said that "Carol Vorderman arrived in a helicopter wearing a blue dress". By an amazing coincidence, Carol was wearing a blue dress as well.

[MJMcCready]

I came across 'I have lived there for all my life'. Do we need for + all in the same sentence? Doesn't seem so.