The -ing suffix is wildly overloaded in English. It can lead to some confusion and is a real challenge to people new to the language, but it can also be really fun.

For example, let's look at "kissing ladies" (ahem). There are three ways to understand this phrase.

The most elementary way is to understand "kissing" as a present tense verb and "ladies" as the object of the verb phrase. E.g. "Stacy is kissing ladies." I think most speakers would kind of short circuit this since if Stacy is any kinda mammal I know of, she just has the one mouth. But it is grammatical.

(cont.)