Too bad we can't add The Closing of the American Mind.

Or Wuthering Heights or The Flowering of New England.

We can have a gerunds list for Flowering...., but isn't Wuthering a participial adjective ? These Old School terms always seemed so slippery to me......that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Do what you think best, I'm sure it'll be CORRECTER THAN ME. (Sorry, couldn't resist funnin' with you).

No, I didn't even know what a present participle was until I read your description. I'm going with the law you laid down. Yes, I think Wuthering is an adjective.

One of the simplest and best tests is to put "the" in front of the element and see how it sounds. If it sounds good, too bad, you've got a gerund....We have a couple of onions in our petunia patch already--About Looking is one--but what-the-heck.

And "flying" in Fear of Flying looks a lot like the object of a preposition, hence a noun. I think Studs' Terkel's Working is also a substantive as he intends it to be understood. Let's just keep collecting and eventually open up a gerund list. ....What would you call "Stompin' at the Savoy" ?

I'll second that -- have pity on the non-native speakers on this site! (We're having enough trouble finding our way around gerunds and other uses of -ing words as it is anyway!) I'm the last person not to empathize with a certain, err, desire to keep lists within a given set of boundaries, and I do take heart looking at all the apparent onions that already seem to have been planted by others (not that I'd have spotted them myself) ... but I do confess I am contributing to this list with my hand stuck firmly in my mouth and perfectly ready to see every single one of my contributions ruled a violation of the rules for not being a present participle but a gerund or some other example of those confounded -ing form that are, no doubt, the bane of high school students all over the world!

Rdbot (Reese) wrote: "T-A,

I'm certain that you will not be surprised when you see my response to your message: I love your comments.
Danke. Gracias. Merci.

Most students in public schools in the USA stopped lea..."

Those rowdy sixties hooligans through all that out along with diagramming sentences. I remember the arguments put forward at the time: English isn't Latin. It's irrelevant. Etc.

I know that a major creative writing school in Arkansas spends the first semester teaching the writing of clear sentences. Where have all the grammarians gone ? Sigh.

I had to diagram sentences (from SILAS MARNER) in school in the 1980s. Mind you, it was a very traditional sort of school - we were also required to take two years of Latin and another two years of a modern foreign language.

I transferred schools in my senior year, and was the only student in my A.P. English class that had heard of the concept.

No idea if they teach it now. Probably not!

That is up there in shocking with something that happened to us at the grocery store last month.

Our bag boy asked us if we still had the big box of books in the trunk (and was very disappointed when we said no, we had taken them to Literacy). And then we found out he wanted to be an English professor!

My mother (an English professor) almost died of shock.

Snort!

What really surprised her was that he said he wanted to go to Iowa.