Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian

by Ellen Jovin

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A fresh and democratic take on language by a gifted teacher." —Mary Norris

"[Jovin] never hectors, never finger-points; she enlightens and illuminates. This is lovely work." —Benjamin Dreyer

An unconventional guide to the English language drawn from the cross-country adventures of an itinerant grammarian.

When Ellen Jovin first walked outside her Manhattan apartment building and set up a folding table with a GRAMMAR TABLE sign, it took about thirty seconds to get her first visitor. Everyone had a question for her. Grammar Table was such a hit—attracting the attention of the New York Times, NPR, and CBS Evening News—that Jovin soon took it on the road, traveling across the US to answer questions from writers, lawyers, editors, businesspeople, students, bickering couples, and anyone else who uses words in this world.

In Rebel with a Clause, Jovin tackles what is most on people’s minds, grammatically speaking—from the Oxford comma to the places prepositions can go, the likely lifespan of whom, semicolonphobia, and more.

Punctuated with linguistic debates from tiny towns to our largest cities, this grammar romp will delight anyone wishing to polish their prose or revel in our age-old, universal fascination with language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358278153
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/19/2022
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	54,121
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

ELLEN JOVIN is a founder of Syntaxis, a communication skills training consultancy. She holds degrees from Harvard in German and UCLA in comparative literature, and has studied twenty-five languages just for fun. She lives with her husband in New York City.

Table of Contents

Grammar Table Road Trips xi

Introduction: A Table Unfolded xiii

1 A National Obsession: The Oxford Comma 1

2 The Joy of Grammar Vocabulary 15

3 "Affect" and "Effect" Are Mean Spelling Trolls 23

4 Corrections, Humility, and Etiquette 30

5 Adverbial Antics 36

6 How Are You? 42

7 Bookzuberance 48

8 Going Farther and Further 53

9 Texting Grammar 58

10 Sentimental Speller 63

11 Please _ (Lie, Lay) Down and Read This 81

12 The Life, Times, and Punctuation of the Appositive 93

13 Weird Plurals: Your Data _ (Is/Are) Giving Me a Headache 100

14 Yes, Ma'am! 106

15 Accents Keep Things Fresh 109

16 The Great American Spacing War 114

17 Capitalization Chaos 121

18 Contract with Confidence! 128

19 The Pleasure of Pronunciation 131

20 I Saw _ (a, an) UFO on Main Street 144

21 Compound Sentences 148

22 Semicolonphobia! 159

23 Labyrinthine Lists 166

24 Colonoscopy 173

25 Comma Volume 176

26 You Can Read This Chapter in Five Minutes or Fewer 184

27 Possessed by Apostrophes 188

28 Plural Possessive Holiday Extravaganza 202

29 Peculiar Pasts 207

30 Peripatetic Past Participles 211

31 What's Passed Is Past 220

32 Gerund v. Present-Participle Smackdown 225

33 Horizontal-Line Lessons - Hyphens and Dashes, A-Z 233

34 Good Fun with Bad Words 244

35 … 247

36 Where's That Preposition At? 252

37 Faces and Facets of "They" 262

38 The Precarious Case of the Pronoun Case 271

39 Whom Ya Gonna Call? 283

40 Bewitching Whiches 292

41 Punctuation Location Contemplation 298

42 Subject-Verb Synchronicity 309

43 More Than Then 322

44 It's Time for "Its"! 326

45 More Homophonous Happenings: "Your" and "Their" 331

46 Had Had, That That, Do Do, Do Be Do! 337

47 The Art of Writing with Your Actual Hand 343

48 School Days 350

49 Grammar Boogie 357

Acknowledgments 361

Tabletop Bibliography: What's on the Grammar Table? 362

Index 365

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

Jovin (English at Work), cofounder of a communication training firm, documents in this zippy account her trip across America with a pop-up grammar advice table. In 2018, she set up shop in Manhattan’s Verdi Square answering “grammar questions from passersby.” Her endeavor was a success, and soon she took the show on the road across 47 states. Whether she’s discussing Oxford commas (“a national obsession, but... surely not a global one”) or contractions (evading them can sound robotic), Jovin uses a combination of intuition and established guidelines to demonstrate that there’s almost always more than one correct answer to questions of communication. Along the way, she shares funny anecdotes about the interactions at her booth and how it functioned as an outlet for individuals to passionately express their points of view: “The semicolon inspires an array of emotional and intellectual responses: curiosity, anxiety, indifference, affection, and disdain,” for example. Jovin’s emphasis is always on fun—chapters have silly titles (“Semicolonphobia!” and “Whom Ya Gonna Call?”), and stick-figure drawings illustrate the concepts. The result reads less like a how-to guide and more like a usage-centered memoir. Fellow language lovers will enjoy the ride. Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"A delightful, educative journey through some prickly regions of English grammar...Jovin positions herself, convincingly, as not just a linguistic, but an emotional counselor, fostering healthy communication rather than judgement...The invitation she poses in her introduction—'Now, please lie down on a nice couch with this book and let’s have some grammar therapy'—is well worth accepting."
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Jovin uses a combination of intuition and established guidelines to demonstrate that there’s almost always more than one correct answer to questions of communication. Along the way, she shares funny anecdotes about the interactions at her booth and how it functioned as an outlet for individuals to passionately express their points of view…Fellow language lovers will enjoy the ride.” — Publishers Weekly

"In Rebel with a Clause, Ellen Jovin has given us a street-level view of English grammar and usage, engaging with kids, drunks, cranks, and dads all over this land. From Verdi Square to Venice Beach, Fargo to New Orleans, she brings organization and clarity to every subject she lights on, presiding over the Grammar Table with tact, humility, and irrepressible playfulness. A fresh and democratic take on language by a gifted teacher." — Mary Norris, author of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Greek to Me

"This is perhaps the most imaginative book ever written about grammar—essentially a series of autobiographical short stories in which the recurring character, Ellen Jovin, plays the educational, charming, and ever-patient protagonist. If you can't stop by her grammar table, stop and buy her book at your favorite bookshop." — Bryan A. Garner, author of Garner's Modern English Usage

"Of all things a jolly grammar book! Curl up and finally take in those niceties of grammar that you always feel like you haven't paid quite enough attention to. Jovin has the gift of making grammar feel like charcuterie instead of medicine—and along the way you also get invaluable randomnesses such as that there are people in Ohio who pronounce 'vigil' as 'vid-ju-al'!" — John McWhorter 

"Those who learn grammatical rules are doomed to repeat them. And, boy, do they repeat them—tirelessly, senselessly, bringing us to the point where much of the English-speaking world thinks grammar is boring or difficult or scary. Ellen Jovin is on a mission to rescue us from that joyless fate. Her generosity and curiosity about language is second only to her generosity and curiosity with the people who approach her for grammatical advice. We could all stand to be a bit more Ellen Jovin." — Lynne Murphy, Professor of Linguistics, University of Sussex, and author of The Prodigal Tongue

“Ellen Jovin is, literally, a public grammarian, doling out advice on myriad fine points of language from behind a folding table ...Jovin shares not only her story as an itinerant language maven but so much first-rate wisdom about everything from the effective wielding of commas to differentiating between ‘effect’ and ‘affect’ (to say nothing of ‘who’ and ‘whom’) that you may not realize till you finish the book that you’ve learned so much. And she does it with sweetness and an enviable generosity of spirit. She never hectors, never finger-points; she enlightens and illuminates. This is lovely work.” — Benjamin Dreyer, author of the New York Times bestseller Dreyer’s English

From the Publisher

"Ellen Jovin is, literally, a public grammarian, doling out advice on myriad fine points of language from behind a folding table she first set up in Manhattan's Verdi Park. In Rebel with a Clause, Jovin shares not only her story as an itinerant language maven but so much first-rate wisdom about everything from the effective wielding of commas to differentiating between 'effect' and 'affect' (to say nothing of 'who' and 'whom') that you may not realize till you finish the book that you've learned so much. And she does it with sweetness and an enviable generosity of spirit. She never hectors, never finger-points; she enlightens and illuminates. This is lovely work." 

Benjamin Dreyer

"In Rebel with a Clause, Ellen Jovin has given us a street-level view of English grammar and usage, engaging with kids, drunks, cranks, and dads all over this land. From Verdi Square to Venice Beach, Fargo to New Orleans, she brings organization and clarity to every subject she lights on, presiding over the Grammar Table with tact, humility, and irrepressible playfulness. A fresh and democratic take on language by a gifted teacher."

Mary Norris

"This is perhaps the most imaginative book ever written about grammar—essentially a series of autobiographical short stories in which the recurring character, Ellen Jovin, plays the educational, charming, and ever-patient protagonist. If you can't stop by her grammar table, stop and buy her book at your favorite bookshop."

Bryan A. Garner

"Of all things a jolly grammar book! Curl up and finally take in those niceties of grammar that you always feel like you haven't paid quite enough attention to. Jovin has the gift of making grammar feel like charcuterie instead of medicine—and along the way you also get invaluable randomnesses such as that there are people in Ohio who pronounce 'vigil' as 'vid-ju-al'!"

John McWhorter 

★ 2022-05-17
A grammar expert takes on vexing questions and pet peeves.

Jovin, the author of several books on writing and grammar, describes her experiences traveling across the country answering the public’s questions about language use. In 49 lively chapters, she recounts her conversations on punctuation, conjugation, spelling, pronunciation, and contentious word choices while offering sage and sensible advice on common areas of confusion. She writes about passersby who air their grievances about the misuse of apostrophes, and she offers jaunty but exceptionally clear illustrations of their appropriate deployment. Individual chapters cover some familiar problem areas—affect and effect, lie and lay, whoever and whomever—along with broader reflections on the evolution of verbal conventions in the digital age and the significance of a respect for language itself. The conversations that unfold on her tour are, she rightly observes, “filled with humor and feeling for the complex linguistic glue that binds us together as human beings and distinguishes us from other living creatures.” Jovin’s charm as an explainer of sometimes-esoteric rules and as a defender of common sense and clarity in communication is a major strength of this book. Another is her lighthearted but incisive commentary on people’s emotional investments in grammar. A large part of the book’s comedy comes from her descriptions of how disagreements about proper expression can pit people against one another, poisoning otherwise successful relationships. Many of the chapters describe people venting about others’ grammatical lapses, and Jovin positions herself, convincingly, as not just a linguistic, but an emotional counselor, fostering healthy communication rather than judgement. The invitation she poses in her introduction—“Now, please lie down on a nice couch with this book and let’s have some grammar therapy”—is well worth accepting.

A delightful, educative journey through some prickly regions of English grammar.

Kirkus Reviews

Ellen Jovin’s attractive middle-register voice with its hint of a scratchy burr is as enthusiastic and welcoming as you’d expect from someone who chats about words and punctuation with anyone who’s interested. The author of three previous books on language, Jovin took her passion on the road by creating a pop-up grammar advice table, which she used as she and her husband traveled the country. Humorous anecdotes and syntactical conundrums fill the enjoyable result, which she reads with animation, clarity, and good pacing. If you notice my use of the Oxford comma, then this book will satisfy yearnings not easily confided to others. Those who like anecdotes of people’s quirks, such as an Alabama businessman’s struggle with “affect” and “effect,” also will be charmed. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile