I have seen repellently bad poetry on various subjects (mortgage services and sewage disposal, to name but two); but my horror at the poem publicized by National Grammar Day was not evoked solely by the poetic standard, low though it is:
I love the King of Ing
He makes me want to sing
Add him to an action word
And it’s a gerund… now a thing!
Nor was it that the poet, Nancy Wright, won a prize for it. What makes me shudder is that it does that noun/thing confusion again (the one that underlies Jon Stewart’s terror error). Even under the traditional (but incorrect) notion that if you add -ing to a verb stem you get a “gerund” or verbal noun, it is not claimed that you get a thing. What is claimed is that you get a word of the syntactic category Noun, the category that includes (among other words) all of our most basic one-word ways of making reference to things. National Grammar Day is celebrating, rather than condemning, one of the worst and most elementary popular confusions about grammar.
Incidentally, the reason it’s a bad idea to use the Latin term “gerund” for words like talking, and a mistake to think that they are nouns, is that the form in question (The Cambridge Grammar calls it a gerund-participle) functions in several different ways:
- In Talking is not allowed the underlined word is a Subject, and you could say it acts rather like a non-count noun.
- In They were talking the same form is the Head of a catenative complement, and most definitely a verb.
- In I bought a talking doll it is an attributive Modifier, and thus functions in one of the ways that are common for adjectives.
So in one seven-word line (“And it’s a gerund… now a thing!”) the poem perpetuates not one but two long-standing and troublesome blunders. The National Grammar Day organization (if “organization” is the word I’m looking for) should be ashamed of itself.
[Thanks to: Steve Jones.]