The Current - One woman's campaign to bring us together — with grammar

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Do you silently judge someone who says “less” when they mean “fewer”? Do you have very strong feelings about the Oxford comma? You may want a word with Ellen Jovin. For years, the author of Rebel with a Clause has been setting up a folding table on the street to talk to people about grammar — which she says can actually bring us together in divisive times.

Have you ever been curious about your favorite artists? Like how they really are? What inspires them? My name is Tom Power. I host the podcast Cue with Tom Power. I'm pretty lucky because I get to chat with actors, musicians, writers, artists of all kinds. Now, some of these folks are legends like Dolly Parton and Denzel Washington, but some

are more emerging like Lioness Core, a rapper from Mississauga who told me about rapping about being bullied for having acne when she was a kid. Anyway, you can find new episodes of Cue with Tom Power every day, weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. The proper way to use y'all. Y'all.

Tell me, does the apostrophe go before or after the A? It doesn't go at all. What are you talking about? Before. Oof. Thank you. I agree with that. Apostrophes can be tricky, so apparently can commas.

I'm a huge Oxford comma person. Yes. And it drives me crazy. When you see them, they don't put the comma before the final letter. I had to teach my ex-husband the difference between well and good, and I should have known that very minute that it would be ex-someday. If you have ever had a heated debate over the Oxford comma or found yourself silently correcting a sign at the grocery store, my next guest is your kind of person.

She is my kind of person. Ellen Joven has spent years answering the public's grammar questions right from her folding table on the streets of New York and beyond. And she has since taken that table on a cross-America journey, writing a book and inspiring a documentary, both called Rebel with a Clause. Ellen, good morning.

Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me on the show. Do you understand the grammar angst that you heard there from those people, suggesting that perhaps if somebody couldn't get the rules of grammar right, they may end up being the ex-husband someday? I have a feeling there may have been something else

involved in the ex part of that. Just a feeling. Just a feeling. In this documentary, which is lovely, you say that it gives you transcendent joy to meet people and talk to them about grammar. What is it that gives you transcendent joy about grammar? Well, I find other people inherently interesting.

So grammar is language glue that binds us together, but then on top of it, while we're talking about something that I find inherently fascinating, and apparently quite a few other people do, we get this human connection, the sense of community, and it just feels so joyous and sometimes even raucous. It's just fun.

And I feel people are hungry for fun. So that's pleasurable for me. How did this start for you? You've called yourself a professional grammar nerd. Well, before I had the grammar table, I had a long-term project called Words and Worlds of New York. New York has 800 documented languages, so I was doing this years-long project where I would study a language, run around town, find people to speak it to me, review language learning products and so on. I discovered the miracle of online language groups for nerds. Technology connected language nerds from around the world together in a way that never happened

when I was a kid. I was in all these groups and blogging and I was on my computer so much and I thought, I don't want to be on the computer, I want to thought, ah, I don't wanna be on the computer, I wanna be around people. So I just moved the activity to the street. With a table. With a table, a very cheap table. I think it was $40, US dollars.

And so you travel, you've gone to all 50 states in the United States, you set up the table and the sign says, grammar table, and then there are prompts, right? There are, there are prompts in case, yes, people sometimes come up and don't remember the question that they had an hour ago, or don't know what they wanna ask,

they feel kind of shy sometimes. So there are things on the sign like comma, crisis. I also want people, I have conjunctive adverb addiction, which is not really an actually established term, but that's for the people who are addicted to furthermore moreover, nevertheless, however, that's my term for that. And then there's also a place that says any language, which is, or all languages, I forget

what the wording is, but it's gotten me into trouble because people say, do you speak all of them? Which I don't, but I definitely don't. There's 7,000 languages in the world, but I want people of all language backgrounds to feel welcome and accepted and comfortable talking at the grammar table. What is a comma crisis?

Is it just the Oxford comma? Oh, there's so many different types of commas. I mean, I could give you a catalog right now. I feel that that would probably not be the most exciting use of our time, but it could be anything. I mean, for example, my neighbor, Jim Smith, lets his dogs out at four in the morning. Do you put commas around the neighbor's name or not?

Like that kind of thing. You can go on and on with commas. There's so many things to talk about. Can you explain what the Oxford comma is for people who are not nerds? It's a pretentious sounding name for what is also often known as the cereal comma, S-E-R-I-A-L. The problem is if I use that term,

a lot of people don't know what I mean. It's the comma that people optionally put before the and at the end of a list. So I ordered salad, spaghetti, and soda. Do you put a comma before the and? That's the Oxford comma. Pete What kind of people come up and ask you these questions about the comma or anything else that you may want to discuss at the table? Julie That's the great thing about this is that all kinds of people come up. I mean,

people who are, you would expect, like professional writers and editors, book nerds, like all librarians, those are kind of what you would expect. But that's really just a portion. It's really a cross section of humanity. I get people who haven't finished secondary school. I get people who are, you know, PhD, MDs. It's, it's the whole range. I have people who are down on their luck, who just happen to be passing by and they see something that looks fun for them. It's really everyone because we all use words and we all have puzzles periodically

about how to treat something in writing or in speech. So that for me is the magic that it really includes everyone. I was wondering what the most common question that you might get would be. And there are just any number of things that you could imagine, as you said, those puzzles and dilemmas that people might face in how they use language. Is there some, are there ones that stand out that you know this is coming, you know this, you could keep score? Do you know what I mean?

Yes, there's one question that I've probably been asked in every state. Which is? And it's about what we just mentioned, the Oxford Comet. That is a US obsession. I don't know how it is in Canada. I would like to find out. But that's the thing that has captured the public imagination about punctuation, I guess. So it's not lie versus lay?

Oh gosh. No, people don't even like talking about that. I mean, the attitude, people are sometimes curious, but the thing is, a lot of times, even if you explain it, they're not going to remember it. And they say that, I'm not just saying that, they say that themselves. They'll take a sheet, maybe pin it up on the refrigerator if I write it out for them. They also, a lot of people feel that those should just, anything goes there, you know, that people shouldn't be so pedantic and picky about the form.

I use all the standard ones myself, but I'm not bothered if someone says I need to lay down for a minute, that doesn't bother me, even though I would say lie there. So that's really interesting because grammar is often, it's a vehicle towards scolding, do you know what I mean? The people will silently, there's the shirt, I'm silently judging your grammar.

I've been scolded. I've been scolded for ruining the English language by being too accepting of language variety. Scolded by other grammar nerds. By people who come up to the table. And so what do you say to them in the face of the scolding? Well, it's not always so effective to make this point. If people are wound up about it, I often just will listen, to be honest, because I'm on the street, I don't need to get in a fight

there. The reality is there's a lot more language variety than people realize, because they grow up in, than many people realize. You grow up in the many people realize you grow up in your language community you Hear certain things but you know you cross the Atlantic and someone will be doing something different in Ireland or in India and that that doesn't mean the difference doesn't mean it's wrong It's part of the the the world of global English now and I find that really interesting and I I don't want to berate people I want to make them more excited about finding out about those things. Are you also though somebody like me

who will whisper when somebody says less, you'll just say fewer under your breath? We might have to get into a fight about this. Oh dear. I do, I am pretty straightforwardly by the book, you know, for countable things. I typically use fewer for what are known as mass nouns or uncountable nouns. Like, you know, if you had a big pile of salt, that would clearly be less. But there are situations, and I think, I think, you know, it's American, it's an American dictionary, but a dictionary

like American heritage does, and also probably other dictionaries as well, does a really good job of documenting about how the lines are blurrier than people think, the history of it. Although people don't usually use fewer where, where I would want to use less. The opposite does happen. For example, you don't, you wouldn't say my pet pig weighs fewer than 53 pounds, right? No, I don't think I'm thinking about it in real time. No, you wouldn't. And that's countable. So that's just an example. It's a little messier than is often

conveyed publicly at the grammar table by committed grammar visitors. We are speaking on public radio. And so the answer, I mean, our audience will already have at the grammar table by committed grammar visitors. We are speaking on public radio, and so the answer, I mean, our audience will already have the answer here. But does it matter if people use correct grammar? I think there's confusion about what, I don't typically talk about correct grammar at the grammar table. I answer the question that is asked of me. And there are different applications for language.

Some are formal, some are informal. I think it is valuable for people to understand their national variety of standard English, if there is such a thing. Correct is probably the wrong word. It's following the rules of grammar, or the rules of language. Well, yeah, for certain contexts, it's good.

It's just, if you are a person who reads and thinks, you're going to encounter a lot of standard language. And I think it's good to use that if you wanna participate in that in your professional life, if you wanna be a part of that. It just is a good idea to be knowledgeable about aspects of language use. It's also just interesting intellectually. I think grammar has the worst reputation and people think it's so boring. It is not boring. It is actually

also a way for people to acquire other languages more easily. Yes, there are language geniuses that can just be plopped into place where they don't speak anything of the language and they just pick it up. But a lot of us, if you say, okay, if you have present perfect in this language, this is what you do in this language with those forms. That's so much more efficient than just trying to pick things up piecemeal for an average adult learner. And you wrote this piece in the New York Times in 2022. It's also about more than grammar, right? You said that how talking about grammar

with other Americans has created bonds in a polarized society. I mean, we are in this, and it's not to get too political, but we are in this moment where people don't speak with each other. They don't talk to each other. They yell at each other. They talk past each other.

What do the conversations that you have at that fold up table with Americans about grammar suggest to you about what's possible when people speak with each other? I think we have to dedicate a certain percentage of our time as human animals on this planet focusing on something that feels good. I feel as though people really,

they go straight to the thing that we're most likely to get angry, or worse about, and fixate on that. And it's just wounds, wounds, wounds. It's like salt in the wounds over and over again. We have to have time, because really, when you catalog, even people who have wildly different opinions, when you catalog the moments of their days,

typically they look very similar. There's a lot that we have in common. And one of the things we have in common is using language. We may have differences of opinion about it, but in the structured grammar zone of the grammar table, you can have bonding pleasure in debating it. You can fight about an Oxford comma. There are mock fights and then people go home happy. That is a positive thing that is building something

that helps us overcome the fissures. We would like you to bring the grammar table to Canada. Well, you should know that I was actually in Canada yesterday for about two hours. What? I just want you to realize, I'm very Canada committed. We had our honey, my husband, Brant Johnson, my husband made the film.

And we had our honeymoon in Canada years ago. We were driving to Ann Arbor yesterday from Detroit and Brant saw a sign for Bridge to Canada. So we drove over it and ended up in Windsor. So we hung out there for a bit. We love Canada. Well, your table it and ended up in Windsor. So we hung out there for a bit. We love Canada. Well, your table is welcome here anytime. Thank you.

I'm sure I'll be crossing over with it. Watch out. There will be demands and public appearances that will be booked because of this. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. I enjoyed the film, but also just as a fellow nerd who is often corrected on his grammar politely. I really appreciate what you're trying to do.

Thank you very much for this. Thank you so much. Ellen Joven is an author and grammar expert. You can learn more about her grammar table journey in her book and film, both called Rebel with a Clause. We are, of course, speaking on CBC Radio, and so you love grammar. You will occasionally correct my grammar.

Thank you very much for that. Does grammar still matter at a time of texting and emojis? Are there grammatical errors that drive you crazy? Are you silently somebody who corrects people when they say less instead of fewer? You can email us, thecurrent at cbc.ca. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.