Learning to love apostrophes
Listen now
Description
Ellen Jovin belongs that rare breed of human with a passion for grammar. You will too if you spend a few minutes with her, your grammar anxiety melting away in minutes. That's what happens when apostrophe-challenged Patrick meets Ellen at her Grammar Table in New York's Central Park. There, Ellen fields questions from passers-by about commas, semicolons, ellipses and weird-sounding neologisms. Ellen tells Patrick about her word-obsessed childhood, her love of hyphens, and why a Jehovah's Witness who approached the Grammar Table, "was not fully there for the apostrophes." Ellen Jovin's new book about her Grammar Table adventures in 47 states is Rebel with a Clause. Photo by Patrick Cox. Music by Greatfool, Frank Jonsson, Arthur Benson, Jules Gaia. Read a transcript of this episode here. Subscribe to Subtitle's newsletter here.
More Episodes
How did Basque survive Spain's military dictatorship under Francisco Franco when speaking, writing and reading it were illegal? With more than six dialects, how did its speakers agree on a standard way of writing the language? And how has Basque thrived in the decades since Franco died? Nina...
Published 04/17/24
Netflix's lavish new adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem is the latest 'translation' of one of this century's best, and best-selling, sci-fi novels. In this episode, we track the role of translation—on screen and on the page—in the global rise of Chinese sci-fi. Our guide is reporter...
Published 04/04/24
Published 04/04/24