Tell me more ×  Consider the following sentence:  Clean up the
design database to initialize costing.  I find the sentence to
be confusing but I'm a native English speaker. I asked my wife
about it and she responded that “costing is a present
participle” and “it's being nominalized (made into a noun), but
we're not used to that”.  The author responded with:  "Now
costing in pure grammatical sense in this case would be a noun
formed from a verb. Something which american english term as
verbal noun. (or like your wife mentioned is similar to a
present participle). So probably grammatically this is correct"
Which is correct?  share|improve this question The sentence is
confusing because it's jargon. Initialize has a large number of
meanings, and so do costing, clean up, and design. Database,
hopefully, is not metaphoric, but the rest are. They use a
number of incommensurable metaphor themes, and it's simply not
clear what's being asked. Moral: most of the time, when
something is unclear, it's not a grammar prob