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Morning Open Thread Tuesday April 22, theme: the gerund [1]
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Date: 2025-04-22
>> I decided to write about the grammatical term called a gerund. Disclaimer, my most recent ‘English’ class was in 1965.
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Here’s my source: Gerund
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A gerund (pronounced JER-und) is a verb that’s acting as a noun. By that, we mean that the verb — the word that describes the action that’s happening, like “biking,” “thinking,” “running,” or “speaking”—becomes a thing, a concept that can now be the sentence’s subject, direct object, indirect object, or the object of a preposition.
It doesn’t stop being a verb, but the role it plays in a sentence shifts from describing the action to being a focal point.
Examples:
Eating is an involved production for food bloggers, like Shoshanna.
Fazal turned off his phone and shut the door so he could focus on studying.
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Based on what I think I learned from that source, here’s some more examples. With my guess about the type of grammatical term the bold words are.
He saw the geese flying in a V-formation (verb)
He saw the flying geese (adjective)
The geese were skillful at flying (gerund)
The flying geese were skillful at it (adjective and pronoun gerund ('it'))
Flying was easy for the skillful geese (gerund)
The geese were happy to be flying (infinitive)
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Here’s an example how words can be ambiguous:
He saw her writing on the wall.
Does it mean: he saw her in the act of writing on the wall?
Or does it mean: he saw what she had previously written on the wall?
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Now consider these:
He saw the writing on the wall (I think writing is a gerund here)
He saw them writing on the wall (I think writing is some sort verb here)
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So put your thoughts in writing below
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Preview: Next Tuesday, April 29, topic is ‘yodeling’
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