THE -<i> ING</i> THING

Last February, when my extremely literate sister was in town, I took the opportunity to tell her my notion that there seemed to be a rash of movies with gerunds in the title (Film Clips, July 9). I had just seen “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway” (which, by the way, your article does not mention) and was struck with what seemed to me to be an epidemic getting more and more silly and out of control. She said I should write a piece for The Times. She did--ask her.

The phrase structure is deeper-rooted and more sociologically reflective than the evocation of “a general feeling of malaise,” which screenwriter-director Steven Baigelman calls it in the piece. A dictionary definition says a gerund “expresses generalized or uncompleted action.” And it is from some dark searching river that these modish names of contemporary stories flow, hallowing our separateness and wallowing languidly in the anemic, incomplete creativ we all have come to accept.

I wish I had written about this. I would have said I want more “Grapes of Wrath” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” more “Gone With the Wind,” “Clockwork Orange” and “Star Wars,” even more “My Left Foot” and “Pulp Fiction.’ More images, more passion--and less bleeding mediocrity .

MEGAN WILLIS GOLDBERG

Marina del Rey

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Connie Benesch’s discussion of - ing titles, while astute so far as it goes, is both culturally and grammatically incomplete. This stylistic trend extends to other areas of popular and academic culture (e.g., rock music’s Counting Crows and Smashing Pumpkins).

More critically, Benesch’s grammatical analysis is flawed. She assumes that the - ing titles must be read as gerunds, which in sentences are employed as nouns, i.e. as subjects or objects. But there is no necessity to make this assumption given the absence of discursive context characteristic of titles. Thus, the word walk , when it appears in isolation, has the potential to be either noun or verb: “We took a nice walk to the beach” or “I walk every morning.”

The - ing words Benesch mentions also might be gerunds or present participles, which function as parts of verb phrases: “Feeling Minnesota really gets me down” vs. “We were all feeling Minnesota that afternoon.” The grammatical ambiguity integral to - ing titles no doubt contributes to the sense of mystery which in Benesch’s account helps to explain their increasing popularity.

BARRY STAMPFL

El Centro