Grammar Girl here, and I hope all my U.S. listeners had a happy Thanksgiving, or is

some like to say a happy turkey day, or is I like to think of it a happy gerund appreciation

day.

What better time to appreciate the English gerund that on a day that's been singled out

for giving thanks, and his name is a gerund.

Thanksgiving.

I've talked about gerunds before in the episode on Common Resume Mistakes and the episode

on possessives and gerunds, but I've never talked about what truly interesting words

gerunds are.

As I said in those episodes, a gerund is a noun formed by taking a verb and adding the suffix

I-N-G.

The gerund form of give, for example, is giving.

If you listen to the podcast on possessives and gerunds, you may remember that the ing form

of a verb can also be a present participle, another funny sounding name.

This is always true, even for the most irregular verb in the language, b.

The form b-ing is both a gerund and a present participle.

So how can you tell whether you're dealing with a gerund or a present participle?

It's not always easy.

In fact, some linguists even argue that it doesn't make sense to have different names

for these verb forms, and that we should just call the I-N-G form that even longer and

funnier named gerund participle.

But for now, we'll just stick with gerunds and leave present participles for another

...