This writer set up a 'grammar table' to bring people together over a love of language

CBC

15-03-2025

If you feel strongly about misplaced commas, or when someone writes "effect" where they should have used "affect," then you'll probably get along with Ellen Jovin.
The New York-based writer, educator and self-proclaimed language nerd has been active on online language groups for years, connecting with word lovers from around the world. But around 2018, she found herself growing tired of sitting behind her computer screen.
"I thought, I don't want to be on the computer, I want to be around people. So I just moved the activity to the street," Jovin told The Current 's Matt Galloway.
With her fold-out table and stacks of dictionaries, Jovin sets up in public parks, street corners — or even on the subway — to talk grammar with passersby.
She's since taken her "Grammar Table," as the blue poster board taped to the front reads, across all 50 states and written a book about the journey, while her husband Brandt Johnson filmed the interactions around the table for a documentary film. (Both the book and the movie are called — wait for it — Rebel With A Clause.)
The many hours Jovin has spent talking to strangers about things like the difference between lie and lay are all attempt to bring people together through conversations about language, she says.
"Grammar is language glue that binds us together," Jovin said. "While we're talking … we get this human connection, this sense of community, and it just feels so joyous and sometimes even raucous."
By no means does Jovin play grammar police at her table, however. Rather than correcting people's grammar, she answers whatever questions visitors ask.
While it's good to understand grammar rules, Jovin says language has formal and informal applications that make those rules bendable. Plus, because English in particular is spoken all over the globe, its speakers in different parts of the world can say something differently and both be correct.
"The reality is there's a lot more language variety than people realize," Jovin said. "I don't want to berate people. I want to make them more excited about finding out about those things."
Jovin encourages discussion, and as a result things can get pretty animated. Commas of all kinds come up in those discussions a lot, but the Oxford comma — which goes before "and" in a list — brings out especially big feelings.
"That is a U.S. obsession," Jovin said. "I don't know how it is in Canada … but [the Oxford comma] is the thing that has captured the public imagination about punctuation."
It's not just word nerds that stop by, either. Jovin says people from all walks of life have come up to have conversations about the finer points of language — English or otherwise. Jovin has studied 25 languages and tries to accommodate lots of them at the table.
That's the real beauty of the table, according to Johnson — and why he started filming the interactions not long after Jovin started the Grammar Table. Watching people come up to the table from his post on a nearby bench, he says he was struck by how willing folks were to talk to individuals they had seemingly nothing in common with, especially in a world that felt so divided.
"I kept seeing … how funny, how human and connected these interactions were," Johnson told As It Happens host Nil Koksal. "I knew right away that it was something really special."
Jovin agrees. She says most people have more in common with one another than they think — and one of those things is the languages we use to communicate.
"We may have differences … but in the structured grammar zone of the Grammar Table, you can have bonding pleasure in debating it," Jovin said. "You can get in … mock fights and then people go home happy. That is a positive thing that is building something that helps us overcome the fissures."
With the film version of Rebel With A Clause, which he calls a "grammar road trip movie," Johnson hopes to share the beauty of those interactions with a wider audience. The film has been screened to three sold-out audiences all in the U.S. so far.