Suffering from punctuation paralysis? Semicolon confusion? End-of-sentence prepositions rage? Relax! The grammar guru, aka Ellen Jovin, will see you now. Or maybe she saw you already. Jovin has set up her Grammar Table in all 50 states, taking on every question posed by passersby, from the basic they’re vs. their to the eternally vexing lay vs. lie. And what she’s learned in her travels is this: Grammar is everywhere. We can’t escape it, even though many of us try. But love it, as Jovin does?
“I think it’s completely thrilling to be able to look at a sentence and know how many clauses and prepositional phrases there are, whether the verbs are transitive or intransitive, what the pronoun case is and so on,” she says. “I would have been ecstatic if we had spent additional years on grammar in school.”
In September 2018, Jovin, then an author, lecturer and communications coach for Syntaxis—her business that focuses on teaching communication workshops to businesses—was spending days cooped inside her apartment working on her language-learning blog as well as interacting in dozens of Facebook language groups. As the walls slowly began to close in on her, she had a revelation: I gotta get out of here!
“I didn’t want to spend that many hours a day online,” she says. Instead, “I wanted to use language in the real world for actual communication.”
So she stepped out of her apartment and set up a folding table across the street. Jovin, decked out in a leopard-print jacket, goofy ball-shaped earrings and a “Grammar Hedonist” T-shirt, was ready to laugh with everyone. She drew them little punctuation charts. She let them vent. As she told passersby: “I am here to answer grammar questions or take complaints.”
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Embarking on a grammatical adventure
That December, she and her husband, Brandt Johnson, decided to take the show on the road, with Johnson filming what would become a documentary called Rebel with a Clause. True, he had never made a movie before. He’d done a lot of other things—acting, writing, even playing pro basketball in Europe touring against the Harlem Globetrotters. But mostly he and Jovin together run Syntaxis. That means they have the same boss—themselves—and could take off as soon as they wanted. So they did.
Those the couple met in their travels from Martha’s Vineyard to Flattop Mountain, Alaska, included kids, cops, lawyers, tourists, prom-goers, some grammar snob know-it-alls who got it all wrong, and two charming but inebriated young men with a pressing question. In Jovin’s book, also titled Rebel with a Clause, we meet Jason and Jack in Decatur, Alabama, after they’ve ambled over to her table to ask where the apostrophe goes in y’all. Jason wondered if it went before or after the a. Jack thought it didn’t go anywhere and y’all was just yall. Jovin explained that there is indeed an apostrophe and that it goes between the y and the all, because it’s taking the place of the rest of the word you.
The guys weren’t finished. While he and Jack helped themselves to her lunch, Jason asked what you call the “dot dot dot” you see when some words are missing.
“This is called an ellipsis,” said Jovin.
“I thought an ellipsis was the little …” Jason drew an oval in the air.
That’s an ellipse in math, Jovin explained. But in grammar it means something else and can be fun to talk about at parties. The plural is ellipses.
“I don’t normally talk to girls that are smart enough to know what that is,” Jason replied. “I need to find some girls that know what an ellipses is.”
He corrected himself: “What ellipses are.”
Using grammar as an icebreaker
One sunny spring day in New York City, I accompanied Jovin to Central Park, where she set up her table and was soon swamped with queries.
“I still never get who and whom right,” said Linda Klein, a tourist from Los Angeles who was visiting with her dad, George Klein. “Do you have a trick for remembering it?”
Jovin smiled. She lives for such exchanges. While it all depends on context, she told Linda, there is a way to figure it out. Who is pretty much the equivalent of he, she and I—a subject. Whom is pretty much the equivalent of him, her or me—an object. And the way to figure which to use, Jovin continued, is to rephrase the sentence it’s in.
To use an example from Jovin’s book: If you’re trying to figure out what goes in the sentence “Evan, who/whom I thought was an honest person, plagiarized two paragraphs of mine,” you slice away everything outside of the commas. Then you consider whether you’d say “I thought he was an honest person” or “I thought him was an honest person.” Since it’s he, you use who.
But when it’s “Evan, who/whom I admired, just robbed a bank,” you take away what’s outside the commas and realize that Jovin admired him, not he. So you discover it’s whom, not who. Also that Evan is someone Jovin should steer clear of. (Yes—we’ll get to this point in a minute. It’s perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition, including of.)
Jovin and the Kleins continued to chat. Grammar is often an icebreaker, just as Jovin hoped. It turns out that George grew up in Czechoslovakia but also speaks Spanish (as does Jovin) and German (as does Jovin) and Hungarian, French and Russian (she’s got the French and a little Russian). Jovin has studied 28 languages and is currently brushing up on her Italian and Portuguese. She apologized to George for not having a Czech dictionary with her that day, though she did have a Polish one. Jovin always brings along a foreign language dictionary or two to help out in case people who speak those languages come to chat.
Linda had one last question: What does Jovin call herself? A therapist? “A roving grammarian,” Jovin answered.
As the Kleins were about to leave, another man strolled up. His name? Bill Funt. Was he possibly related to Alan Funt, creator of Candid Camera? Yup. That was his dad. This Funt was not fishing for the kind of squirmy moments that made his dad famous, but he did pose a couple of tough questions. First, he wondered if there was a nongendered word for aunt or uncle. After all, he said, the nongendered word for niece or nephew is nibling (a term coined by linguist Samuel E. Martin in the 1950s).
Jovin said she didn’t know of such a word, at least not in English.
“OK,” Funt continued. “My father, before he married my mom, was married and had three children. Then they divorced. Is there a word for what she [the first wife] is to me?”
“I have this same situation in my family,” Jovin replied. But there is, in fact, no special word, she said.
“In other words, I’ve stumped you twice!” said Bill, exultingly.
“But maybe the word you’re looking for doesn’t exist,” Jovin countered primly. “This is not a word-manufacturing plant.”
Knowing when to break the rules
As Jovin and Johnson crisscrossed the country, certain grammar beefs and beliefs came up time and again. “I know people who will jump off a building before they split an infinitive,” Jovin says. An infinitive is the “to” form of a verb: To jump. To sigh. To barbecue. Those are infinitives. Fact is, there are times it is positively elegant to split them apart. Think of “to boldly go …”
As Jovin writes in her book, “The verb to go is the infinitive, and the adverb boldly intervenes.” It doesn’t sound bad—it sounds thrillingly Trekkian. But for eons, schoolkids have been taught to avoid it. Slaying that myth is something Jovin does almost daily.
She also deals with this one: A woman came up to her table to complain that the people who really need a grammar lesson probably never stop by. “My pet peeve is sentences ending in prepositions,” the woman said. “I see it all the time among people who should know better!”
The woman swanned off before Jovin had a chance to delicately explain that she should know better. Prepositions are little words that show relationships, like on the hill, at the hill, to the hill, up the hill. Never allowing them to end a sentence is another grammatical myth. This one somehow made its way into English via Latin, Jovin says. “But English is a Germanic language.”
Is it really better to say “That’s for what friends are” than “That’s what friends are for”? Or “Up to what are you?” instead of “What are you up to?” Ending a sentence with a preposition is not only grammatically kosher—it’s often required if you want people to understand what you’re driving at. Yes, at.
Tackling the big questions
Another myth people cling to is that all adverbs—words that modify verbs—end in y. Words like slowly, snootily and bombastically do, of course. But the word often is also an adverb, as in “He’s often tripping over his toga.”
Jovin also has to deal with all the confusion over semicolons: Are they instead of a dash? A period? A comma? Yes. Basically, a semicolon is a way of connecting two ideas that could be separate but are also sort of linked; it’s also a way of making sure that phrases filled with commas have something bigger separating them.
So let’s move on to the battle royal of everyday grammar. The punctuation mark that starts brawls, ends dates and drives writers to drink. You know what I’m talking about: the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, also known as the series comma. It’s the much-debated practice of putting a comma before the and in a list.
Some publications, like the New York Times, swear by it. Other entities (we’re looking at you, Associated Press) recommend using series commas only when crucial for clarity. For instance, let’s look at this sentence: “I invited the ax murderers, Frank and Louie.” In that sentence, am I alone with the ax murderers, whose names are Frank and Louie? Or did I stupidly invite some ax murderers along with Frank and Louie? Putting a comma before and makes it me, Frank and Louie, scared for our lives. Without this clarifying comma, Frank and Louie are the ax murderers, and it’s just me with them. Yikes.
When a chemical engineering major stopped by the Grammar Table in Starkville, Mississippi, Jovin gave him a less-chilling example of this debate: “I ordered a salad, spaghetti and soda.” Would he put a comma after spaghetti? “Yes, definitely,” said the budding engineer. “It sounds weird otherwise, because if you say, ‘I ordered salad, comma, spaghetti and soda,’ it’s like spaghetti and soda are one entity. What is that? That’s nasty.”
Know what else is nasty? The lay vs. lie quandary. It’s just too confusing. Lie is something a noun or pronoun does: You lie down. The cow lies down. And lay is the past tense of lie. Fine. But! Lay is also the present tense of (and here’s where my head exploded) when you’re describing what someone did to a direct object: Gerry lay down his shrimp fork. Lenore lays her glasses on her head and then can’t figure out where she put them. Which, between you and I, just happened.
Wait, wait! That’s between you and me, not I! I vs. me is such a common mistake that it, too, must be mentioned here. “People think me is a dirty word,” Jovin says.
A student visiting the Grammar Table in Morgantown, West Virginia, told Jovin: “I know it’s right to say ‘Will you go to the bar with Emily and me?’ but I don’t want to sound stupid, so I say, ‘Will you go to the bar with Emily and I?’ ”
Jovin assured him that some people, including her, do know that me is absolutely right (and not stupid). The way to tell which word to use is, again, to strip away a lot of the sentence. Would you say “Go to the bar with I?” or “Go to the bar with me?” Me wins!
Maybe the biggest rule in the English language, says Jovin, is that nothing is set in stone, much to the chagrin of a certain demographic.
Acknowledging the evolution of grammar
These days, Jovin hears older folks complain that their younger friends are saying “on accident” instead of “by accident.” The generations are also divided by the word like. You can, like, guess, which group uses it more and which group it, like, drives crazy.
And using they to denote a person who doesn’t want to be identified as he or she also requires some getting used to by the older generation. Especially since it’s singular, and hearing that “they” is coming over to do Jell-O shots begs the question of just how many Jell-O shots to prepare. (That said, they, even when denoting one person, still gets are, not the is treatment, Jovin notes.)
Like life, medicine and vacuum cleaners, grammar is always evolving. Usually, the older generation finds the younger one unutterably lax, while the young folk roll their eyes at their elders’ persnicketiness. “My feeling is that both generations should be tolerant of the other’s habits,” says the roving grammarian. “Every generation is innovative. They create their own words and terms, and it’s fun for them. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just what happens.”
Up with this, we all should put.
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