Some exciting news from Dot Wordsworth in this week’s Spectator:

A creature so rare that its existence had been discountenanced has been discovered in South Africa. The creature is the English gerundive, a relative of the extinct Latin gerundive, and its discoverer is Jean Branford, the respected editor of A Dictionary of South African English. I had never believed in the existence of the English gerundive until now. Just to place it in its habitat, let us remember that:

1.      The participle (Latin amans) shares properties of verbs and adjectives, as with reading, ‘the reading public’.

2.      The gerund (Latin amandum) is a verbal noun, active in meaning, as with reading – ‘reading occupies Charles’ (where reading acts as a subject); ‘reading law journals occupies Charles’ (where the noun phrase is the subject of the sentence, and reading takes an object, law journals, in the noun-phrase); ‘Charles enjoys reading’, where the gerund functions as an object.

3.      The gerundive (Latin amandus –a –um) is a verbal adjective passive in meaning. It is translated as ‘fit to be loved’, ‘fit to be read’, or ‘lovable’.

It is easier to spot a part of speech if you know what it looks like. Fans of How To Be Topp, will have no trouble recognising a gerund, an aggressive, egotistical predator with a racy private life. Here a gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns.

This is in keeping with its active nature. The gerundive, as befits its role, is a puny, passive little thing. Below, the gerund, a social snob, “cuts” the gerundive, who meekly takes it on the chin.

 No wonder it is all but extinct.

No gerundive was found to exist in English. But Dr Branford says, ‘What about reading matter? Or whipping boy?’ The form of the gerundive is in English the same as that of the participle, but then so are the forms of the participle and the gerund. The meaning of the gerundive is distinct from that of the gerund: distinguish reading room and reading matter, where the latter has a passive sense. Or distinguish whipping boy and whipping post. With whipping post or reading room, the gerund acts as a modifier, just as nouns can, in constructions such as violin case, dog whistle.    

The newly discovered gerundive in chewing gum (‘chewing gum sold here’) is distinct from the gerund identical in form, (‘chewing gum is a horrible habit’). Other examples of gerundives from Dr Branford are stewing steak, cooking apples, bedding plants. Don’t forget that a passive element is present in the gerundive, so pickling onions include a gerundive (‘onions fit to be pickled’) but pickling spice (‘spice for pickling onions’) does not.

In passing, Dr Branford notes that Kingsley Amis, in The King’s English (1997), gets the gerundive completely wrong. Homer nods. She also remarks that the great Henry Fowler’s ‘notion of the grammar of participles was at best hazy’. Fowler said that English does not happen to possess a gerundive. The late Robert Burchfield, in his revision of Fowler’s Modern Usage, notes that Latin does. Only now has the English gerundive, thanks to Dr Branford, been bred in captivity.

The distinction is clear. Chewing gum is gum that gets chewed. Stewing steak is steak that gets stewed. These are gerundives. Chewing gum is a bad habit. Stewing steak can take a long time. These are gerunds.

I am struggling to find further examples of the English gerundive, although I know they must be out there somewhere. By analogy with cooking apples, we have baking apples or eating apples, in the sense of apples to be baked or eaten rather than the activity of baking or eating apples. And there is whipping cream, that is cream for whipping. I started wondering about “writing paper”, but I think that is a gerund, meaning “paper where you write”, as a reading room is a room where you read.

This evening I will be attending a birthday celebration in the East End of London. I will be on the look out for gerundives and if I spot one I will catch it and drag it back home. It will make a good scratching post* for my cats.

*"Scratching post" differs from "whipping post", because it gets scratched, while the whipping post doesn't get whipped.