Grammar Girl here. Over the past year I've been developing a grammar game called Grammar Pop

for the iPad, which I'm happy to say is now available in the iTunes App Store. But I have to tell

you in coding the answers for the part of speech game. In order to make it fun instead of frustrating,

I had to put more thought into the difference between garrons and participles than I ever imagined I

would. So that's the topic we're going to talk about today. It's tough to know the difference

between garrons and present participles in English just by looking because they both consist of

the base form of the verb plus the ING suffix. Always. There's not a single verb in the entire

English language that breaks this rule. Even the most irregular verbs of all be and go fall in line.

Their garrons and present participles are being and going.

Since garrons and participles are always identical, why do we even have two words for them anyway?

The main reason is that in Latin, garrons and participles had different forms to justify those

different names. And the distinction got carried into 18th century English grammars along with those

Latin names. If you think that's a silly or outdated reason, you're not alone. The authors of

the massive, Cambridge grammar of the English language argue that having two words doesn't make

sense. And they just call the ING form the gerent hyphen participles. We're not going to go that far

though. It's still useful to have the names gerent and participles to talk about the different

roles the ING form of a verb can play. Plus it helps the game be more fun. If you're a long time

listener, you may remember from episode 251 that a gerent is a kind of noun. So if you find an

ING form of a verb doing the kind of things that nouns do, it's a gerent. For example, it might be

the subject of a sentence. As in skiing is my favorite sport. It might be the object of a verb

as in I love skiing. Or it could be the object of a preposition. As in after skiing, I like to sit

in the lodge and drink hot chocolate. In all these examples, the gerent skiing, all by itself,

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