Who all is at the bar? We’ve been playing with grammar jokes at the bar for a few months now. Surely, it’s got to be pretty full in there with all those who have walked in? Let’s review.
Last month, a misplaced modifier found herself all alien-like at the bar. In July, an oxymoron and a mixed metaphor joined the party. In late June, three intransitive verbs walked into the bar. The first customer was a bit strange if you recall. It was the passive voice, but being who he is, the bar walked into him. Awkward.
As it turns out, there’s plenty of room left at the bar, so who should we welcome next? Oh, I see them coming now… Gerry and Franklin.
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
Franklin, the infinitive, is tall and lanky… gangly even. He’s nerdy but collected, and he carries himself with an air of je ne sais quoi… I’m smarter than you. Gerry, the gerund is shorter and more rotund. Overall, he’s a happy-go-lucky guy, but he can be twitchy and a bit anxious in new situations.
But you know, Franklin and Gerry are best buds… because opposites attract or something equally cliché. Franklin needs to lighten up and Gerry helps him have fun. Gerry needs help keeping his shit together sometimes, and Franklin provides stability.
If you’ve watched the classic TV show Cheers, you’re in for a treat because here comes a good character analogy so you can really understand Franklin and Gerry. Remember Frasier’s wife Lilith? She was a bit of an erudite stick-in-the-mud – super smart but had trouble relating to “normal” people. And, then there’s Norm. Nooooorrrrmm! Norm was essentially the bar mascot – a beer-drinking, wise-cracking, corner-of-the-bar fixture. Lilith is undoubtedly Franklin and Gerry is Norm. Got it?
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
Franklin glides over to a dark corner booth and Gerry shuffles in behind him wondering why they don’t just saddle up directly to the bar. Franklin orders a dry martini, shaken and stirred, with three olives. Top shelf. Gerry orders a Miller Lite, grumping to the waiter about how his wife’s been on him to lose weight.
Franklin’s on a mission this evening. His latest paper on the intersection of applied psychology and cognitive neuroscience just got rejected from a fourth publisher. He’s frankly (pun intended) had it with the pressures of academia to constantly publish. Franklin is looking to drink, to get drunk and to forget, if only for a few hours, until he can figure out what his next move needs to be. Some wounds just need to fester in alcohol for a while to get cleaned up.
Gerry doesn’t have much going on. He’s moving and shaking and chatting and shooting the shit with anyone who comes by, and he’s got one eye on the Red Sox game.
The differences between Gerry and Franklin are as striking as the forms they represent. Gerry is all about the “ing” and Franklin simply cannot part with his preceder “to.”
Franklin sits and ponders. He thinks he wants to go to the store, but he’s honestly not sure what he even wants to buy.
Gerry is already on his way. Having a grocery list is not a prerequisite for going to the store.
Franklin the Infinitive
As native English speakers, we rarely, if ever, think whether we need an infinitive or a gerund in our sentences. I’m fairly certain I never even heard the word “infinitive” until I started studying Spanish in middle school. Then, all of the sudden, the infinitive was everything. It was the most basic way to identify and learn verb vocabulary in Spanish. There were two great things about verbs in their infinitive form:
1. They were nice and easy to spot in text because they ended in similar way – ar, er, or ir. If you took French, Portuguese or Italian, it was essentially the same deal because they’re all romance languages. Here’s a handy chart for infinitives in the romance languages.
2. You didn’t have to conjugate infinitives according to who/what was performing the action. This was great because you didn’t need to worry about tacking on the correct ending for I, she, the boys or we. Or, God forbid, if you had to use “you” as the subject… was it singular or plural, and was it the formal or informal form? If I just brought you back to 7th or 10th grade language class, good – that was my intent.
When you think about the word “infinitive,” it most likely brings to mind the more common word “infinite.” And if you think about something being infinite, well it goes to say that some things are naturally the opposite of infinite meaning they are “finite.” So… can verbs be finite?
It turns out the answer is yes. Verbs can be finite. And, it really isn’t rocket science. A finite verb is simply a form of a verb that shows agreement with a subject and is marked for tense. In other words, a finite verb is one that’s conjugated. It can stand on its own in a sentence. He cooks. Subject + verb = complete sentence. To cook is the infinitive. He cooks is conjugated in the second person so it’s finite.
The only other thing about Franklin that’s vaguely interesting (sorry, Frankie) is that as an infinitive, he can technically be used as a noun, adjective or adverb. Say whaaasass aat? Yeah, turns out Franklin is actually pretty versatile. Let’s check it out.s
Infinitive as a noun: To sleep is the only thing Franklin wants after a night of heavy drinking at the bar with Gerry. (“To sleep” is actually the subject of the sentence; therefore, it is a noun.)
Infinitive as an adjective: Wherever Franklin goes he brings a book to read so he doesn’t have to get caught in dreaded small talk. (“To read” modifies the book, so it sneakily acts as an adjective.)
Infinitive as an adverb: Franklin risks humiliation every time he submits an article to a science journal in order to achieve recognition and stature among his superiors and fellow professors. (“To achieve” explains why Franklin risks humiliation. In this way it acts as an adverb describing the risk).
Franklin seems pretty straight-forward, but he’s actually a bit more complex. That’s how he likes his gin.
Gerry the Gerund
If Gerry is so active, why isn’t he slender? Gerry has us all fooled. It may look like he is exercising this very moment with all that moving about, but that’s just a ruse. Gerry isn’t a verb at all, he’s a noun in a verb costume! We confuse Gerry with what we know as the present progressive tense of a verb, or the “ing” form. “I am exercising.” The verb in this sentence in its infinitive form is “to exercise”. The verb in its present progressive tense “am exercising” means it’s happening right now as I write… which is a lie, but you know what I’m saying.
“Gerry’s least favorite activity is exercising, while his favorite is drinking.” Exercising and drinking look a lot like verbs in those sentences, but they’re nouns. “Gerry does not exercise; Gerry drinks.” Now, they’re verbs. “If drinking were an exercise, Gerry would be fit.” Now they’re nouns again, but drinking (the subject) is still wearing the verb costume whereas exercise took his off. Making sense?
Gerry, the guy drinking Miller Lite in the corner, is a trickster. We thought he was a pretty simple guy – just identify him with the “ing” ending. But, we have to be careful to pick out the nouns because gerunds and gerund phrases always function as nouns. Gerunds can act as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, subject complements, or objects of a preposition in a sentence.
Gerund as a subject: Drinking is bad for your health.
Gerund as a direct (or indirect) object: Gerry says that they do not appreciate his drinking at home nearly as much as they do at the bar.
Gerunds as a complement to the subject: Gerry doesn’t mind Franklin’s habit of drinking away his sorrows every once in a while because he does it too.
Gerund as an object of a preposition: The police arrested him for drinking and driving.
If we flip back over to the romance languages for a moment, we’ll find they too have gerunds. And, they too get confused with the present progressive tense or the present participle. Spanish, Portuguese and Italian all seem to follow a similar way of forming a gerund. Instead of “ing”, they tack on some form of a vowel plus “ndo.” “I am opening the door” is the present progressive tense and it becomes “estoy abriendo la puerta” in Spanish. “Opening the door, she greeted me with a big smile.” Now we have the gerund in English. In Italian it would go something like “Aprendo la porta, mi ha salutato con un grande sorriso.” French is the only one of the bunch that simply doesn’t have a present progressive tense. They use the simple present tense, (J’ouvre la porte) or, if they want to emphasize, they use a phrase that translates roughly to being in the middle of doing something (Je suis en train de ouvrir la porte). But, they do have the present particle; they just form it differently than the others. The French use “ant”. So, if we wanted to say that same phrase in French as earlier, we’d say, “Ovrant la porte, elle m’a salué avec un grand sourire.” Now our handy chart looks like this with the romance language gerunds:
Apparently I’m in the bar too dorking out on languages. Excuse me. Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming… Gerry is now on his fifth Miller Lite. Franklin just polished off his third martini and is considering another while busy calculating their respective blood alcohol levels given their drinks’ ABVs and their height, weight and age. Gerry laments the fact that his rotund middle section doesn’t equate to a larger “bladder tank” as he calls it. He gets up to pee, only to get distracted at the bar TV by an unforced error that leads the Red Sox to bring all three of their guys home. He orders another celebratory round before he shuffles off to the men’s room.
Gerry and Franklin walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
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Blog Images
Lilith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_Sternin#/media/File:Lilith_Sternin_in_%22Sisterly_Love%22.png
Norm: http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2008/11/norm.html
Bar Jokes: The Foo at bar.com