Depending how you were raised, a gerund is a) stupid, b) the amazing hybrid part of speech that blends the best features of the noun and the verb, or c) a small furry mammal often mistaken for a hamster. It's this flexibility that leads me to predict we will all soon be gerunding.
Imagine a single word that signifies both a thing and an action. The cost savings alone are staggering! What a powerful tagline any of the following would make:
- Being
- Hearing
- Eating
- Tasting
- Feeling
- Loving
- Playing
- Thinking
- Going
- Coming (this one could get a little sticky...)
See? I mean -- Seeing?
Nike and the lamented Kinko's got us halfway to the Age of the Gerund by giving prominent play to verbs. The next step:
- Officing
- Doing
English has already turned lots of nouns into verbs for us so adding "ing" won't cause a lot of fuss in many cases (shipping, batting, phoning, scouting, planning, penning, etc. etc.). But, taking a cue from Kinko's "to office," I think we're going to see brands concoct new verbs out of nouns, only to turn them into nouns again:
- Computering
- Devicing
- Televisioning
- Couturing
- Leathering
- Improvementing
- Timepiecing
Grab your gerunds, folks, before someone else does.
I going to take a pass.
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