The Wondrous World of Gerunds

It's a verb. It's a noun. No, wait -- it's a gerund!  You may remember gerunds as those "-ing" words from 8th grade grammar class, but what are they, really? The Grammar Monkeys over at The Wichita Eagle deconstruct what it means to be a gerund: from their frequent functioning as nouns to their subject/object versatility and the occasional participle fusion.  It's as complicated as Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin.