But of course clarity and tone matter. For two decades, Jovin has run a communication skills company aimed at business professionals, empowering them to express themselves more effectively. Then, in 2018, he decided to bring his experience to the general public. Packing his style guides and a folding table, he hit the road, parked on sidewalks across the country (47 towns in 47 states before Covid struck), and offered grammar instruction to passersby. Part manual, part travelogue, “Rebel with a Clause” is the story of the grammar tablea kind of linguist version of Lucy’s psychiatric help desk in “Peanuts.”
When it comes to advice, Jovin falls on the less prescriptive end of the grammatical spectrum. “Mine is not the Grammar Judgment Table,” he writes, and whether it’s the great less/less debate or the abbreviations of online chatter, Jovin remains generously evasive. “You can do it either way,” he says about whether to use the Oxford comma, refusing to call out “Ghostbusters” for using who instead of who or the creators of “Star Trek” for boldly splitting their infinitive.
However, not everyone Jovin meets has such a Zen approach to language. In many of the anecdotes in the book, people approach the grammar table in groups, calling on Jovin to officiate a dispute. Others vent about family or friends (who may or may not be standing next to them). And yet, as presented by Jovin, these complaints sound rehearsed, airy, largely joyous. In terms of discreet anger, they are of a different order from the colleague who takes credit for your work or the neighbor who parks in your space. In Jovin’s transcriptions, the grammatical niceties seem on the whole to be implicitly ironic, or at least aware of his inconsistency. They are reliable staples, just some of the ballast with which families and longtime friendship groups engage in daily conversation. Perhaps they are even substitutes, part of the psychopathology of everyday life. Perhaps that irritation with your husband that is pronounced nuclear What nuclearor with the elderly relative who still writes two spaces after a period, it is simply the visible tip of a deeper frustration. In New York, someone tells Jovin that he fired his therapist for saying “between you and me” (using the subject pronoun me instead of the object pronoun me). I’d love to know how the therapist interpreted it.
The format of “Rebel with a Clause,” however, does not lend itself to sustained contemplation. Jovin’s journey is told in short vignettes that highlight his own headstrong dynamism and the competitive pedantry of the people he meets. The most interesting moments are when his patients, such as they are, begin to consider their relationship to grammar: often a sense of memory fading, knowledge lost, the melancholy that high school sharpness has been blunted with time. Some, to his surprise and Jovin’s delight, resort to mnemonics acquired decades ago (fanboys by coordinating conjunctions by, Y, neither, but, either, even, so); others are suspicious of novelty, as when Jovin defends his updated “Chicago Style Manual” only to be told that his caller’s mother “would probably prefer an older edition because it would be more of a purist.” There is a lot about language and authority in this statement, but Jovin’s narrative has already moved on to the next scene.
For a grammar book that’s nearly 400 pages long, actual advice is pretty sparse. Many of Jovin’s 49 chapters extract considerable mileage from relatively minor points: past against I pass; that against after; to affect against effect. Jovin has written user manuals, but with his folksy, peripatetic arrangement, “Rebel with a Clause” isn’t exactly one of them. Strong in charm, then, but without enough prescription or reflection, the “Grammar Table” is found falling between two (grammar) stools.
Dennis Duncan is Professor of English at University College London and author of “Index, A History of the”.
Tales and advice from an itinerant grammarian
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