I found this in an article about the movie ‘Se7en’.
"Each sin is listed below with the sinner proceeding it.
Gluttony: fat man
Greed: Eli gould (lawyer)
Sloth: Vicktor (drug dealer)
Lust: man who hired hooker
Pride: beautiful woman
Envy: John Doe
Wrath: David Mills"
I thought ‘preceed’ was the wrong word but after looking at several online dictionaries it seems that ‘proceed’ can mean ‘to come before’ or ‘to continue after a pause’.
In the above example, is ‘procceding’ used correctly?
That is correct.
I think this is incorrect.
Proceed would mean ‘to come after’ (as in ‘sinner proceeding it’; the sinners are listed after the sins in your list.)
From ‘Encarta’:
"1.begin action
2.continue with action"
Hm. I’ve never seen ‘proceed’ used to replace ‘precede’. In the case you presented, though, ‘proceed’ means ‘follows’ or ‘comes after’ because the sinners are listed after the sins.
That’s interesting, though.
Regardless of whether it can be used that way, it’s pretty clear that the better word would be “succeeding,” and the best word would be “following.”
They could have chosen a better word to describe something that follows another thing. Subsequent posters will proceed to describe this better than I can.
Clever enough, Patty,
You posted and stopped. Now someone resuming the thread will ‘proceed’.
But in the original example, there didn’t seem to be a stopping point. Unless you can say the second half of a sentence proceeds the first. It would only seem to be so if you arbitrarily broke the sentence in two.
The fundamental problem here is that “proceed” is an instransitive verb: it doesn’t take an object. Something can proceed, but can’t proceed another thing. “Follow,” on the other hand, is transitive, so one thing can follow another. The usage in the OP is just wrong.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re right about that.
This is definitely a usage error, anyway. “Proceed” does not mean precisely the same thing as “follow”; this is a very weird-sounding sentence.