Where do you stand on the Oxford comma? Do you struggle to remember when to choose “who” or “whom,” “affect” or “effect,” and “lay” or “lie”? Does hearing someone end a sentence with a preposition make your head explode? Or, when someone corrects you for doing so, perhaps you reply as Winston Churchill allegedly did: “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Some see grammar as a minefield of split infinitives, misplaced modifiers and subject-verb disagreements. But for Ellen Jovin — who has no objection to starting a sentence with “but” — it’s a joyous, messy and often laughter-inducing affair. The 59-year-old author, teacher and self-described grammar guru, who has studied more than 25 languages, spent years driving around the U.S. with her filmmaker husband, Brandt Johnson. In parks and on street corners, Jovin set up a folding table and answered people’s questions about commas, apostrophes, pronouns and pronunciation.
The couple’s epic road trip became the subject of Rebel With a Clause, an 86-minute documentary that is screening on Thursday, June 5, at New Hampshire’s Lebanon Opera House. The movie chronicles Jovin and Johnson’s visits to all 50 states with her “grammar table,” where she invited people to ask their language-related questions — and posed a few of her own.
Jovin, cofounder of the communication skills training firm Syntaxis in New York City, began the odyssey on September 21, 2018, by setting up her pop-up advice stand on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Within a minute, passersby were engaging her in often-impassioned discussions about word usage, sentence structure and their least favorite ways in which other people mangle the English language.
“I love grammar,” Jovin says in the film. “I love language, and I just love talking about it.”
Clearly, Jovin is not alone. As Johnson, 59, watched his wife’s sidewalk encounters, he realized he was witnessing something more than tutorials for the grammatically impaired. Jovin was connecting with people on a level that transcended race, gender, ethnicity, class and politics. That December, he started filming it.
“It was beautiful to me,” Johnson told Seven Days, “and I wanted to share it with the world.”
By February 2019, Jovin and Johnson were on the road, making stops in Milwaukee; Santa Fe, N.M.; Nashville, Tenn.; Austin, Texas; and New Orleans. They even paid a visit to Middlebury, Vt., which appears briefly in the movie. By 2020, when COVID-19 forced the temporary tabling of the grammar table, the couple had already visited 47 states.
By the time pandemic restrictions were lifted, Jovin had published her best-selling 2022 book Rebel With a Clause: Tales and Tips From a Roving Grammarian, and Johnson was nearly done editing the documentary. (He handled the entire technical production himself.) In all, the pair logged more than 50,000 miles, not including their flights to the last two states: Alaska and Hawaii.
Jovin and Johnson are now in the midst of a multicity tour of Rebel With a Clause, which includes Q&As with Jovin at each screening. The couple sat down for a Zoom interview with Seven Days in a spare moment between their four daily screenings.
“I just had a long conversation with someone over the use of commas before ‘but,'” Jovin said. “It’s a little funny to me when people get that punctilious about punctuation.”
Though Jovin refers to the stand as her “grammar table,” she also happily fields questions about punctuation, spelling, pronunciation, and even regional and generational differences. (Jovin and Johnson were both born before 1970, so they say “by accident” rather than “on accident.”)
Jovin is neither a scold nor a stickler for rules — “There are no judgments at the grammar table!” she proclaims — and she rarely gets irked. One exception: when people grumble that someone else’s question isn’t a grammatical point. “To me, that’s just really pedantic,” she said.
Jovin asserts that many of our so-called “rules” are nothing more than conventions that continue to evolve. When, for example, people object to someone’s use of commas, she said, it’s usually because “it doesn’t correspond to their recollection of what Miss Smith taught them in sixth-grade English class.” Her prime directive is always clarity, not adherence to tradition.
People who aren’t word nerds may assume that Rebel With a Clause won’t be their cup of tea. Yet the movie is fun, upbeat, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, and touching without becoming sappy or cloying.
In case you’re curious, Jovin and Johnson do occasionally disagree on points of grammar.
“Brandt is more likely than I am to preserve the nominative form of pronouns after a linking verb. In other words, ‘Was that he?'” Jovin said. “Whereas I don’t care anymore, and I feel that that’s a little unnatural and say, ‘Was that him?'” What married couple hasn’t squabbled over that issue?
Beyond illuminating how Americans write and talk, Rebel With a Clause speaks to our shared humanity.
“We’re all connected by the words we use,” Jovin says in the film. “The grammar table is a constant reminder to me that you cannot know … what’s inside people’s hearts and what’s inside their minds until they choose to share that with you.”