 Barrow and Tipler, for example, among the ten criticisms of BKL studies, include the inappropriate (according to them) choice of synchronous frame as a means to separate time and space derivatives.The BKL conjecture was sometimes rephrased in the literature as a statement that near the singularity only the time derivatives are important.Such a statement, taken at face value, is wrong or at best misleading since, as shown in the BKL analysis itself, spacelike gradients of the metric tensor cannot be neglected for generic solutions of pure Einstein gravity in four spacetime dimensions, and in fact play a crucial role in the appearance of the oscillatory regime.