[DiscourseFan]

You think you're a pedant, but you haven't yet encountered someone with such a thorough knowledge of Indo-European grammar that could tell you that not only is nominalizing participles common in our family of languages, it is so common you see it in practically every language in the family and it doesn't violate any rules of grammar. "beating" is a present participle, like "learning." It would be fine to say, "the beatings of the man," but you may be confused about whether it is a subjective or objective genitive--is it the man who is being beaten, or the man doing the beatings. Likewise, I think what makes you uncomfortable about the term "learnings" is not whether it conforms to any grammatical or syntactic rules, but that it is rather ambiguous--it can be taken as transitive or intransitive. You "learn" something, but you also learn by being taught by someone. To say, then, the "learnings of the man," could refer both to his education, and to his teachings (and you see there, "teachings," is no different from "learnings" grammatically, except that "to teach" is definitively transative).

>And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."

You might be shocked to learn that such expressions are extraordinarily common in say ancient Greek (which uses participles in a very similar way to English--they are related after all!) People "look a looking," an expression used to mean someone holds a particular countenance. If someone can teach teachings, why can't someone learn learnings? I don't think there is anything wrong with using intransative verbs in this way.

[retrocryptid]

Sure, ask the person who understands indo-european languages to join us.