She even wears her adoration on her T-shirt when ministering to the masses on grammar: “The comma said, ‘Wait’ the question mark said, ‘What?’” Jovin may be one of only a handful of Americans who can truthfully say, “I really love grammar”. It’s English, so there must be an exception, which is sentences when the Oxford comma provides clarity of meaning clarity – “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.” In this case, using the Oxford comma clarifies that Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty aren’t her parents, just in case you were confused. (I went modern and stopped using them, even though I got A’s in grammar.) Traditionalists and students who got A’s in grade school grammar still use the Oxford comma. A prime example is the Oxford comma, which is defined as the final comma in a list – “Please bring me a pencil, eraser, and notebook.” The Associated Press Stylebook has unceremoniously discarded the Oxford comma as an unnecessary relic and a waste of space.
However, many grammatical conundrums are uniquely English.
Jovin insists her goal is to help people make peace with punctuation, notwithstanding her laminated tableside sign that says: “Vent! Comma crisis? Semicolonphobia? Conjunctive adverb addiction! Ask a question! Any language!” Jovin earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard in German studies and a master’s degree from UCLA in comparative languages, so she really means any language! The boys disagreed over her simple explanation and wound up in a fistfight with each other. Jovin recounts one encounter in Manhattan where she lives when two young boys approached her Grammar Table and improbably asked, “What’s a gerund?” Jovin explained a gerund is a verb turned into a noun by adding ing – like run and running.
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Ellen Jovin’s books about grammar, including how to fix English in a business setting so it doesn’t read and sound like a foreign language.
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