Ellen Jovin is the author of “Rebel With a Clause: Tales and Tips From a Roving Grammarian” and cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication-skills consulting firm.
As the proprietor of a free grammar advice stand called the Grammar Table, I have a lot of experience managing language debates. One punctuation or participle question at a time, I survive small conflicts to do grammar again another day.
I’ve answered grammar questions from total strangers in all 50 states. That’s a lot of states, but there is pleasure in, say, debating the merits of the Oxford comma, which is what literally hundreds of people have done at the Grammar Table over the past eight years. (I used “literally” literally there.)
But are those conversations really just about the comma? No. We have a natural human need to connect with other people, and haggling over punctuation and misplaced modifiers is a bonding experience. Though some people claim to hate grammar, curiosity about words and how we put them together is ubiquitous.
The Grammar Table is a vehicle for people to nourish hyperlocal in-person lives. They can debate verb forms (“pled” or “pleaded,” “sank” or sunk”?) with neighbors from down the block. We are often said to live in bubbles, but bubbles are not always bad.
Consider dogs. Dogs live in bubbles. Dogs never waste time responding to angry Facebook posts from dogs in faraway places, and look how happy they are. We are built, substantially, for the delightful kinship of local bubbles, and our animal selves need tending to. At the Grammar Table, one person thinks it’s “tendinitis,” another insists it’s “tendonitis,” we find that experts disagree, and no one goes home angry.
English is not homogeneous across time and space. Do not say “fanny pack” in England. Although some topics are clear-cut, there is variety in how words are used, and formed, and punctuated. There aren’t always final answers everyone agrees on, and that’s OK. I met one woman in New Orleans who noted that adding “bitch” to the end of a sentence saves you from ending in a preposition.
At the Grammar Table, I let some things go. People can get mad if you tell them that it is indeed acceptable to split infinitives. I have books, there are databases, I am completely ready to make the infinitive-splitting case, but sometimes it’s better to just listen. You can’t grasp in mere moments what led a person to the powerful beliefs they hold, whether about grammar or something bigger.
In 2019 and early 2020, my husband, Brandt Johnson, and I traveled the country with the Grammar Table and made it to 47 states before COVID hit. At that point social media and the relentless demands of email inboxes had already eaten away at a lot of face-to-face communication time. But then COVID took more.
Over the past year, though, we have been traveling the country again with the film Brandt made about our adventures, called “Rebel With a Clause.” We’ve done in-person events from Washington state to Washington, D.C. Gaggles of grammarians show up in punctuation T-shirts and bond over how to form the plural of a surname like Roberts. (I regret to inform you that multiple Roberts family members are the Robertses.)
Brandt and I have now been to dozens of arthouse cinemas all over the country. Some people tell us this is the first time they’ve been in a theater since before COVID. The theaters are sometimes worn, often beautiful and idiosyncratic, and alive with popcorn and comity. We need theaters. We need fun places (intentional adjectival use of “fun”) to talk and gather. We need in-person get-togethers with our neighbors and friends. We need physical encounters for the center to hold. We need touch, we need hugs.
Many of us also need to spend less time staring at devices. The messy imperfection of the human spirit thrives in conversation with others. Long ago I turned off all grammar checkers. I refuse to allow my self-expression to be constrained or directed by a machine. AI can fix your grammar, but it will silently steal your soul while relocating your apostrophes. Recently I witnessed an incident in which ChatGPT recommended changing subjunctive to indicative.
Not on my watch, AI.
On the surface, my life is about answering grammar questions, but in many ways it’s not about grammar at all.
The author will be appearing at two screenings of “Rebel With a Clause” at West Newton Cinema on March 4, National Grammar Day.