Word: gerundive
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...work, an effortless and lovely cloud of confetti about the decline of the sweet, the good and the pure, was called Trout Fishing in America. The main character was Trout Fishing itself-among the cleanest and most refreshing combinations of words in English. Unfortunately, this personification of a peerless gerund suffered a surrealistic metamorphosis that included its becoming a pen point, a legless alcoholic and a dinner companion of Maria Callas. At the end, Trout Fishing wound up in a junkyard as a used stream, for sale by the foot...
...wisely used current Americanisms to give the language the proper effervescense and irreverance. To render the play in early twentieth century American would have been a gray business: nothing is as dead as dead slang. Senelick's greatest triumph is his version of a Spaniard (Daniel Deitch) speaking English. Gerund endings are assiduously dropped where they should be; b's and v's are assaulted with appropriate force...
...youthful ebullience," and nothing, no matter how sacred, is safe from its inventiveness. At Oxford and Cambridge, short academic gowns have been known as rags or cover-arses, bum-curtains or tail-curtains. In the 17th Century, venerable dons were called pupil-mongers, and in the 18th they were gerund-grinders. The heads of colleges were skulls ("a skull being an ancient and desiccated head"), and their meeting place was Golgotha...
...Unrecognized Watcher. Togliatti, who likes to cap an Assembly debate with an obscure quotation from anything including the Bible and Pinocchio, that night debated happily such revolutionary questions as the use of the gerund as a participle, the correct version of lines from a 16th Century Italian poet, the corruption of the Italian language by certain "francesismi" (Gallicisms). Behind his steel-rimmed glasses his brown eyes sparkled merrily as he told how he had watched 30,000 Communist-led partisans give the Eternal City a mighty show of force...
...There is no excuse for not offering Latin. ... I wouldn't know a gerund from a syntax...