Fun with Gerunds!

Welcome to an interactive (kind of) grammar lesson.

A gerund is a verb, ending in -ing, used as a noun.

For example,

"Playing the clarinet is fun." Playing is the noun in that sentence.

"I enjoy eating peanut butter." Eating is the primary object noun in that sentence.

"Mouth-breathing and close talking are obnoxious." Mouth-breathing and talking are the nouns in that sentence.

Therefore, when you modify the sentence with the person doing it, you have to use the possessive, as in,
 "His playing the clarinet is fun for him!" or
"My eating peanut butter makes me very happy," or
"Your mouth-breathing and close talking make me
want to both hold your lips closed and
run away with equal fervency."

Most people, however, string their nouns together willy nilly.

"You mouth breathing is annoying." ALL KINDS OF NOUNS
"Him playing the violin is loud." WHAT THE HELL IS HIM PLAYING? What sort of playing is "him"? I hope it's nice, since it's so loud.

So when someone very kindly says, "I appreciate you noticing," that's like saying, "I like you essay," or "You late arrival is annoying."

You might say to me, "Thank you, Katherine. I appreciate you teaching me about gerunds."

And here I would imagine the little stick with the apple on the end that all my elementary school teachers had for some reason, and I would imagine whacking you with it.

You appreciate MY teaching you about gerunds.

The teaching is mine.

Twit Face

Today's front page revelation from D.C.'s preeminent political newspaper, Politico, is that lobbyists are not down with being up on their social media. The article suggests that it's strange for this center of national power to have so little presence on the world's most popular form of media, the constant barage of updates from Facebook and Twitter. As the author puts it,

About half of the year's top-grossing lobby shops have no discernible presence on either Facebook or Twitter, the nation's two most popular social-media sites, a POLITICO analysis* indicates. Most of the rest have two- or three-figure followings that would embarrass a not-particularly-popular ninth-grader. 

It isn't surprising, given the audience for Politico (I picked up mine at my friendly local Starbucks, nestled comfortably between K Street and the IMF, whilst ordering a Dirty Hipster) that the artcile focused on the loss to public relations specialists of a potential power source at the public square that is the interwebz. What is surprising is that message's provenance in Dave Levinthal, a former Communications Director at the Center for Responsive Politics, which claims its mission as "to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry and a more transparent and responsive government."

The fact lobbyists don't yet understand the Twitterz while elected officials have begun to is a positive sign that there is an area of public life untouched by the enormous quantities of money spent shaping public policy. However, it also means that the Facebook-friendless lobbyists are still doing their work behind closed doors, in the computer-free smoke-filled back rooms of yore. That is the true concern: not the impact that Farragut North is failing to make 140 characters at a time on an iPhone-glued electorate, but the impact they continue to make outside the scrutiny of a public that, to its credit, is a greater fan of the President than of Katy Perry.

So pursue your right to e-rage, or better yet, engage in a reasoned, populist discourse, and Tweet Dave.

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* I understand "POLITICO analysis" to mean "an intern counted." I do, however, want to credit Dave and his copy editor for their excellent hyphen usage.