By Ellen Jovin
When my sister Diana and I were little, we would make jam and jelly with our stepmother, Donna. My dad began calling traffic jams “traffic jellies,” amusing us kids greatly. Decades later, I still refer to traffic jellies. And so does my husband, Brandt, because he heard about traffic jellies through me, and that makes him even more part of the family than he already would be naturally after our 32 years together.
Today, being able to refer to traffic jams as traffic jellies makes me slightly less cranky when we are stuck in traffic.
Our language use links us, heart and mind, to the people we love. We begin our lives inside a small group of humans with various linguistic idiosyncrasies, and those idiosyncrasies often dwell inside us across decades.
Long Island word lover Joe Cesare is a prolific collector of amusing language examples from the wild. He comes by this habit honestly, from his New York Times crossword-in-ink enthusiast mom.
Joe told me, “Years ago, I remember my mother saying to me, ‘I love you’ and I’d respond ‘Me too,’ and she’d say, ‘You love you too?’” Joe’s mother died in 2005, but the word play and word ardor did not; they live on in her son.
“My mother was always the grammarian, always correcting her husband and their six children, especially during breakfast and dinner,” a man in North Carolina told me. So many people have their own family grammarians—most often their moms but also their dads, grandmas, grandpas, and other relatives too.
People are sometimes rueful but more often jovial about their perceived shortcomings relative to familial expectations. “My mother was a high school English teacher forever correcting my grammar errors and attempting to expand my limited vocabulary,” a man in California told me cheerfully via email.
“Feel free to make corrections!” wrote another grammar correspondent. “My mother would.”
In Massachusetts on National Grammar Day (March 4, just in case you don’t have that memorized), I chatted with a man named Paul Miller at a West Newton Cinema screening of Rebel with a Clause. Paul’s mother, Estelle, who had died a few months earlier, had been a grade school teacher for her entire professional life—“and a grammarian even before that,” according to Paul.
Late in life, she was in a memory care unit with Alzheimer’s. “It seemed at times like she wasn’t present and didn’t know what was going on around her,” Paul told me. “That is, until someone spoke using incorrect grammar. Then she would light right up, and the grammarian in her came out to play. She would correct a ‘her’ to a ‘she,’ an ‘I’ to a ‘me,’ or remind the caregivers that they shouldn’t end sentences in prepositions.”
Estelle passed away last October, just a few days before her 89th birthday. “Before she was a grandma, she was a grammarian,” Paul said in his eulogy. A nephew told the crowd, “I can’t help but correct people’s grammar. It’s just something that’s in my blood. Thanks for that, Grandma.”
The language stories I hear embrace everything from malapropisms to misplaced modifiers, but it has often struck me that “lie” and “lay” play an outsized role in family grammar lore. A reader of my book Rebel with a Clause reported, “My mother is always telling her doctors that they’re using ‘lie’/‘lay’ incorrectly, risking life and limb!”
In Little Rock, Ark., while trying and failing to entice her daughter to approach the Grammar Table, a woman once told me, “My mom used to drill my ass! I mean till she died. She would correct me. And then, after she died, she still haunts me. I still think, Ooh, is that ‘lie’ or ‘lay’? F–!”
The abovementioned North Carolina grammar correspondent spoke at length at his mother’s funeral. He reports that as he came to the end of his tribute, he said, “So as she lays here in front of us…”—causing the congregation to chime in, “Lies here!”
Language love passes regularly from one generation to the next, but it also makes romance bloom.
Susan Syler of Galveston, Texas, told me, “In 1990, when my (future) husband Tom and I had just begun dating, we were standing in my kitchen, just chatting, getting to know each other. I was telling some story or other, and in the telling, I correctly modified a gerund with a possessive pronoun.
“Tom immediately interrupted me, saying, ‘You know about gerunds?!’ to which I replied, ‘You know about gerunds?!!!’ It was the grammatical equivalent of love at first sight. We shared the story with an English teacher friend of my mother’s, who had T-shirts printed for us that said, ‘Gerund Aware.’ And we were together for 35 years until Tom died this past summer.”
Ellen Jovin is the author of the national bestseller Rebel with a Clause and the subject of a grammar docu-comedy by Brandt Johnson, also called Rebel with a Clause, currently playing at theaters around the country. You’ll find a complete collection of her columns for the WSR — HERE.
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