Boy, is my face red.
Barely a day has passed since I revelled in the arbitrary nature of the English language, and I find out that my example was nonsense. The possessive-before-gerund rule, which I thought perhaps to be the work of some drug-addled, charismatic loon, exists for a reason. My fevered fancies were of this wild-eyed, bedraggled prophet convincing his fellows of a way of speaking that he received from a chorus of trees, but instead it's there for the ultimate raison d'etre for any rule of grammar: to clarify.
It's pretty obvious when you think about it. Which, equally obviously, I didn't. Tragically, I do remember a specific example where I had to use the possessive to clarify the sentence, but for some reason hadn't the wit to think of it as applying to the rule as a whole.
But now I know. Nominative suggests reading the following as a participle, genitive suggests gerund.
Of course, this means nothing in everyday use; we'll all still have to rely on context to know what others really mean. And my use of it has gone from idle whim to grammatical necessity, but remains essentially unchanged.
But I'm content, suffused with the warm glow that comes from knowing that I learned something.
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