Le gérondif d’un fruit sec.

That the writer looking for wriggle-room when attempting to compare the incomparable invariably finds a lexicon-defying escape hatch in the gerund was borne in on me on a further reading of George Saintsbury’s Scrap Books (I now have the set of three). 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fruits-sec-and-napoleon-of-over.html 

As has been cogently observed by grammarians, as soon as we add a definite or indefinite article to what we regard as a gerund – whether singular or plural – we automatically transform its verbal sense into a verbal noun.

So clearly we hear the scream of a gerund when Hannibal Lecter says to Clarice Starling, ‘You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.’ 

Or our ears are seduced by the art of a master prosodist in Poe’s gerunding of ‘And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming . . .’

Or see . . .

‘At the end of the first year arrived . . . what was called “The Speaking,” when certain boys recited verses written by themselves . . .’ (From A Memoir of Schooldays by Sir Charles Lyell Kt FRS. )

 

The Pernickity.

But do we hear the scream of a gerund-like adjectival noun when George Saintsbury, in comparing the incomparable, writes: ‘Chocolate-boxity is after all better than Cubism.’ (?)

There’s a hidden definite article here, I suggest, cf. ‘... the pernickity and the fashionable ...’ from the Preface to The Four Gospels in Braid Scots - William A Smith (1901)

To Have and Have Not.

I was SO pleased to have a text of mine published this year in the Winter issue of Ambit, particularly as I feared its subject was contentious: the sickly aesthetic of Lewis Carroll. Anyhow, the piece was published free of any censorious hand ( A Bad Case : The Unexplained Growing Pains of Elise von Alpenberg ), prompting a deal of private correspondence in which I questioned those assumptions that accept there is a classical economy expressed by Carroll’s prose, a feature many would expect of an Oxford logician. 

Mind you, my misgivings are more to do with the sensibilities of an offended preciosity that few would indulge, for my contention is that, though the prose of Alice has, yes, a marvelous colloquial simplicity, it's disappointing to find speech like, 'Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again!'  

I would have thought that a logician would have retained the perfect-tense auxiliary verb HAVE and dispensed with the past participle of the verb GET. The sort of double verbing Carroll employs with his irritating auxiliary+verb clusters lacks the crystal clarity one would have expected from an Euclidean geometrist and syllogistic rationalist.

 My tender ear would prefer:

 'Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I have to grow up again!'

However, an august grammarian (one the augustest) responds to demolish my theory.

He says: ' "I have got an idea" has a tense perfect-tense auxiliary verb HAVE followed by the past participle of the verb GET, with a slightly idiomatic meaning: normally "I have VERBed" is the perfect tense of "I VERB", and refers to something in the past seen from a present reference point and with present relevance; but "have got X" simply means "possess X". '

How elegantly put!

He goes on: 'English is loaded with auxiliary + verb sequences with slightly idiomatic meanings (i.e., meanings not fully predictable from the usual meanings of the words used) ... Nothing wrong with them, nothing surprising about them, nothing "doubled".'

Mmm. Nothing doubled, eh?  Still not entirely sure about that.