Social Bondage

I was reading one of the local papers here in Guwahati the other day, and this headline caught my eye.

Most English speakers outside of India (and quite a few in India) would probably be wondering what on earth 'social bondage' refers to, and why on earth some students would even want it.

I think the word they're actually looking for here is 'bonding' and not 'bondage'. In standard English, bondage refers to 'slavery', or 'the act of being tied up'. On the other hand, bonding refers to 'the establishment and development of a close friendship / relationship'. The related verbs are also somewhat different: you bind someone by tying them up, but you bond with someone by develop a relationship with them.

Now the reason I thought this was something to write about wasn't to poke fun at the writer, though I can imagine a few of you gagging over the picture. It reminded me of one time I was proofreading a report written by a non-native English speaker. While her written expression was good, in my mind it seemed like she was overusing gerunds, those non-finite verb forms like swimming that also behave somewhat like nouns. For example, she would write something like "their investigating of the causes ...", where it would sound more natural for me to say "their investigation of the causes ...". Similarly, she'd write something like "the failing of the report to demonstrate ..." where I would say "the failure of the report to demonstrate ...".

She wanted to know why I had suggested these changes. To be honest, I should have just said, "I don't know. It just sounds better." Instead, I made up some grammatical rule (based on this handful of examples) that it was better to avoid the gerund forms (those -ing forms) if there was already a noun that had been derived from the verb. I mean, would you say "the starting of the race" or "my loving of dogs"?

But of course the rule doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny. Gerunds and other nominals can co-exist quite happily in some contexts, e.g. the ending of the novel and the end of the novel are pretty much the same thing. And non-finite verb forms can also be lexicalised, e.g. beginning and opening - these are the words you'd find listed as their own entries in a dictionary, unlike words like fainting which would be treated as an entry under the verb faint.

In the end, I guess the choice between 'gerund' and 'other lexical nominal' just depends on what is used more frequently in that context or in an analogous context.

Of course, looking at the headline above, I can't help but think that someone had been told something similar, and was just trying to avoid the gerund without realising the full effect of their final word choosing. Um, choice.