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.
| 82 |
| Vote |
Comments (10)
Add Comments
