This writer has set up a “grammar mass” to bring people over a language of language

If you feel strong about the wrong comma or when someone writes “effect” where you should have used “affect”, then you will probably get along with Ellen Jovin.

The writer, educator and self-proclaimed non-proclaimed Nerd has been active for years in online language groups, connecting with word lovers from all over the world. But around 2018, he woke up to get tired of sitting behind the computer screen.

“I thought I don’t want to be on your computer. I want to be around people. So I just moved on the street,” Jovin said Jovin said The currentMatt Galloway.

With her foldable mass and dictionary stacks, Jovin settles Public parks, street corners – or even on the subway – To talk about grammar with passers -by.

Since then, he has taken the “grammar table”, as reads the blue poster recorded in front, in all 50 states and wrote a book about travel, while her husband, Brandt Johnson, filmed the interactions around the table for a documentary movie. (Both the book and the movie are called – wait -o – Rebellious.)

Many hours that Jovin spent talking to strangers about things like the difference between lie and lay are all trying to bring people through language conversations, she says.

“The grammar is language glue that binds us together,” Jovin said. “As we speak … we get this human connection, this feeling of community and feels so cheerful and sometimes even bad.”

However, in no case Jovin plays the grammatical police at her table. Instead of correcting people’s grammar, she answers any questions that visitors ask.

Although it is good to understand the grammatical rules, Jovin says that language has formal and informal applications that make these rules bent. In addition, because especially English is spoken all over the globe, its speakers from different parts of the world can say something different and both are correct.

“The reality is that there is much more variety of language than people realize,” Jovin said. “I don’t want to beat people. I want to make them more excited about finding out about these things.”

Jovin encourages discussions and, as a result, things can be quite animated. Verdicles of all kinds appear in these discussions a lot, but the comma from Oxford – which goes ahead “and” in a list – reveals particularly great feelings.

“This is an obsession of the US,” Jovin said. “I don’t know what it is in Canada … But (Oxford’s comma) is the thing that surprised the public imagination about punctuation.”

They are not just words of words that stop. Jovin says people from all points of life have come to have conversations about the finer points of the language – English or otherwise. Jovin has studied 25 languages And try to host a lot of them at the table.

This is the true beauty of the table, according to Johnson – and why he began to film the interactions not long after Jovin started the grammatical meal. Following people to come to the table at his post on a nearby bench, he says he was hit by how willing people were to talk to individuals with whom they had nothing in common, especially in a world that felt so divided.

“I continued to see … how funny, how human and connected these interactions were,” Johnson said As it happens Host Nil Koksal. “I knew immediately that something was really special.”

Jovin agrees. She says that most people have more in common with each other than they think – and one of these things are the languages ​​we use to communicate.

“It is possible to have differences … but in the structured grammatical area of ​​the grammatical table, you can have a liaison pleasure in its debate,” Jovin said. “You can enter … mocking struggles and then people go home happy. This is a positive thing that builds something that helps us overcome cracks.”

With the film version a Rebelliouswhich he calls a “grammar travel film”, Johnson hopes to share the beauty of these interactions with a wider audience. The film has been designed at three audiences sold so far in the US.