Dark corners of the language: the gerund
February 9th 2009 07:49
One day about 17.4 billion years ago, when a group of people with unflattering clothes sat down in a meeting room to begin to plan the universe, one of them voiced doubts about the deadline for the job.
"This looks pretty complicated," he said. "I'm not sure we can achieve this within the proposed timeframe of 135 million years."
"I agree," said a second person. "This is arguably the most complex infrastructure project ever undertaken. Nothing could be more complicated than this. It can't be rushed."
There was a moment's silence as the people in the room reflected on the immensity of their task.
But then they were shocked to hear a voice of dissent. "There is something more complicated than this," said a small, grey-haired man with thick glasses seated at the end of the table, "although that is at present hardly salient.
"On the other question, if you would kindly allow me to address the meeting for a moment, I would like to propose a universe creation methodology which would take considerably less than 135 million years. In fact, if my calculations are correct, I believe we can get the job done in less than a second.
"I call it the Big Bang method."
The room listened in awe, or perhaps it was shock.
"What," one finally said, "can you possibly mean by, 'something more complicated than this'?"
The grey-haired man sighed. "It's called," he said, "the English language."
English has many dark corners. Let's look into one labelled "gerund".
Gerunds are amongst the oddest things in the universe. They are so odd it is surprising that Douglas Adams did not mention them in any of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
Gerunds are massively complex grammatical entities, and some explanations require supercomputers to process.
We shall try to keep it simple.
Gerunds are verbs which act like nouns. In the sentence, "My drumming disturbed people in the next time zone", the word drumming behaves as a noun even though it is a verb, and is thereby a gerund.
It's a big language out there.
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Comment by Janet Collins
Acceptable Etiquette
The Social Critic
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Good post, Chris.
Comment by Spike 2
Qwerk
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By the way, the word 'enormity' doesn't really have anything to do with size. It picked up that meaning more recently - in 'proper' literary speak it means 'ugliness'. I remember that 'cos my English teacher at school marked it in red on an essay once...!!
Comment by Chris Champion
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Comment by Chris Champion
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Enormity is an interesting word. Your teacher was right that there is an older, different meaning. English adopted the word around 1475 from the old French word énormité; the French adopted their word from the Latin enormitas. In Latin it was used to mean both 'unusual' and 'enormous', but by the time English grabbed the word it was used to mean 'derivation from a normal standard or type' or 'moral or legal rectitude'. By the 1500s, it had changed meaning slightly and was used to denote 'monstrous wickedness'.
According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the first (incorrect) use to mean 'excess in magnitude' was noted in 1792, and its use today to mean 'huge' remains "disputed".
There is an interesting note on this at www.answers.com: "Enormity is frequently used to refer simply to the property of being great in size or extent, but many would prefer that enormousness (or a synonym such as immensity) be used for this general sense and that enormity be limited to situations that demand a negative moral judgment, as in 'Not until the war ended and journalists were able to enter Cambodia did the world really become aware of the enormity of Pol Pot's oppression'."
So, Spike, your teacher was right with the red circle to show up the enormity of your error, and in his/her honour, I'm changing my enormity to immensity.
Comment by Andrew Kerstetter
Inkwing
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I'm learing and re-learning a lot of these terms and their applications in an Advanced Composition class I'm taking. Lots of fun! Gerunds and participial phrases are my favorites.
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Comment by Lilla
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I have to laugh because as i scrolled down to add my bit, the vote count was sitting on 42!
now I've forgottenw hat I wanted to say....
Comment by Chris Champion
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52! The far superior number created by Lilla's visit
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