'Rebel With a Clause'

 

[As readers can see from the headline below, this post is about—wait for it—grammar.  (Actually, it’s about a grammarian and a documentary film about her.) 

[ROTters will know that I have been a writing teacher and that in this blog, I have posted many articles about writing and writing mavens.  I haven’t posted much about grammar per se, but that’s part and parcel of writing—knowing and properly using grammar.

[I first taught writing in the mid-1980s.  I was a doctoral student hired to teach a required undergraduate writing course.  When I grew up, in the Eisenhower ’50s, we still learned grammar, syntax, the parts of speech, and spelling and how to parse a sentence and diagram it.

[I was chagrined to find that none of my students knew English grammar.  Clearly, learning grammar had been deemed old-fashioned in the decades between my high school graduation in 1965 and the years my undergrads finished their secondary education. 

[I wasn’t so much disturbed because my writing students didn’t know the grammatical conventions I’d had to learn.  I discovered, though, that I couldn’t discuss with the tyro writers what the problems they were having communicating in writing were without using the grammatical terms that were the jargon of writers and writing.  I had to start teaching grammar (sort of surreptitiously) so my students and I would have a common language when we talked about their writing.] 

“GRAMMARIANS GATHER TO CELEBRATE AN AMBASSADOR”
by Katherine Rosman 

[This report ran in the New York Times on 9 March 2025, in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted on the Times website as “Grammar Fans Flock to a Film About Participles and Gerunds” on 6 March and updated on 8 March.]

At the New York premiere of “Rebel With a Clause,” there was a shared love of language.

Jennifer Griffin stood outside a movie theater on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, waving to a friend.

“I’m here with all the other dorks!” she called out, using a prepositional phrase to get the attention of Lisa Kuklinski. Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor [a person who revises or corrects a manuscript, text, etc., for publication, especially to find and correct errors in style, punctuation, and grammar] who was wearing a shirt that read “I’m Silently Correcting Your Grammar.” Notably, the message lacked a punctuation mark at the end.

The women are members of a group chat in which they text each other about the words they find in the New York Times Spelling Bee game. This was their girls’ night out. “When you find someone as nerdy as you are about the Oxford comma,” said Ms. Kuklinski, an actuary, “you find you have plenty of other things in common.”

They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles.

The film’s star, Ellen Jovin, schleps her table from Maine to Hawaii and each state in between, dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life.

At the screening this week, more than 450 grammar aficionados (the median age hovered in the early-AARP-membership range) came to celebrate “Rebel With a Clause,” which was directed by Ms. Jovin’s husband, Brandt Johnson.

[AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is a U.S. interest group that focuses on issues affecting Americans 50 years old and older.

[Rebel With a Clause was produced by Syntaxis Productions (a communication skills training firm, cofounded in 2007 by Johnson and Jovin) and released in the United States on 8 February 2025. It runs 1:26 (86 minutes).]

Before and after the screening, filmgoers bantered about whether to place a comma after the penultimate item in a list [i.e., the Oxford comma], discussed the appropriate usage of “lie” and “lay” and united in a shared reverence for language, ideas and the grammatical rules designed to give clarity to free expression.

[The decision whether to use the Oxford comma (also called the ‘serial comma’ or the ‘Harvard comma’) and the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ aren't matters of grammar, strictly speaking.

[Using or omitting the Oxford comma and resolving the ambiguities both choices can engender is a question of rhetorical style, which is concerned with the clarity, logic, and precision of effective communication.

[The ‘lie’/’lay’ confusion is a matter of diction, the selection of precise, appropriate, and effective words to convey a message, influence tone, and suit a specific audience.

[Style, diction, grammar, and other elements of good writing (and speaking) are coequal, but separate.  Though Jovin and the others in this article, as well as the one posted below, have been labeled ‘grammarians,’ but they clearly arbitrate questions in all areas of good writing and speaking.]

Ms. Jovin greeted the audience members and directed them to stacks of worksheets with the “Nonmandatory Grammar Quiz” she had created. (Sample question: “What is the square root of the number of letters in the part of speech that ‘punctiliousness’ is?”)

[‘Punctiliousness’ is a noun, which has four letters. The square root of 4 is 2.  (That is, 4 is the product of 2 multiplied by itself, i.e., 2 x 2 = 4.)

[Curiously, if you answered that ‘punctiliousness’ is a substantive (11 letters) or a nominal (7 letters), you’d be correct.  The math, however, would be complicated, since neither 11 nor 7 has a whole-number square root. In fact, neither is even a rational number, since the decimal fraction that results never ends!]

She was wearing a shirt with rhinestones that spelled out “Grammar Is Groovy,” which she had ordered online at the last minute. “All of my other grammar clothes are not dressy enough,” she said.

A writer and writing instructor who has studied about 25 languages, Ms. Jovin first set out her grammar table on the streets of New York in 2018. Since then, she has written a book, also called “Rebel With a Clause,” which was published in 2022 [Mariner Books].

Mr. Johnson, a 6-foot-6 former pro basketball player and communication skills consultant, loomed amid the crowd. He said that as he witnessed the “humor and humanity” at the grammar table, he was moved to capture it on film. “I saw the fun and the connections,” he said. “It felt like just a beautiful thing that I wanted to share with the world.”

The theater filled up with strangers and friends. Lloyd Rotker and his wife, Judith, had once seen Ms. Jovin speak at a library. “I’m very concerned about grammar,” Mr. Rotker said. “As we lose interest and skills in grammar, we lose clarity in language and eventually in thought.”

Ms. Rotker said she was not as grammatically attuned as her husband, but that he did not often correct her. “That’s why we’re still married,” he said. She nodded. (Their 51st anniversary is later this month.)

Sitting near the front of the theater were Janice and Korey Klostermeier, former neighbors of Ms. Jovin and Mr. Johnson. They had flown in from Miami Beach.

“I love good ol’ grammar,” said Ms. Klostermeier, who quickly added, “That’s O-L-apostrophe.”

The joy among the grammar lovers was occasionally tempered by worry over word choice.

“Can I sneak by?” Taylor Mali, a poet, asked the people sitting on an aisle as he slid past them toward a seat in the center of their row.

“You may,” one of them answered.

[‘Can’/’may’ is a matter of diction again.]

Mr. Mali sighed as he recounted the exchange. “Of all the places,” he said, his head hung low.

The movie opens with an animated discussion in Decatur, Ala., between Ms. Jovin and two men who may or may not have spent a few hours in a bar before sidling up to her grammar table. They wanted her to weigh in on the proper placement of the apostrophe in “y’all.”

The film then takes viewers on Ms. Jovin’s road trip to Detroit; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; and beyond. She and Mr. Johnson set up a table covered with dictionaries and usage manuals, and wait for questions.

The action is breezy and lighthearted. At several moments, the audience burst into laughter. When Ms. Jovin professed her love for diagraming sentences, the crowd erupted in applause.

The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition.

To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”

[I started studying Latin in 8th grade and then learned German some years later. I decided that English grammar had so many exceptions because the Latin grammar system that was being applied to English was being forced on a Germanic language just didn’t quite fit. There were bits left over—so . . . exceptions.]

Audience members filtered into the lobby afterward, checking for news on their phones. While they were watching a film centered on language and civil discussion, President Trump was delivering a sometimes inflaming speech to Congress, during which he faced politicians protesting silently with signs, others groaning and booing, and a heckler, Representative Al Green [D-Texas], who was tossed out.

[Representative Green was removed from the House of Representatives chamber for heckling Trump during his address to a joint session of Congress on 4 March 2025 (the day of the screening). He was later formally censured by the House on 6 March.]

The timeliness of the film’s message was not lost on Kathryn Szoka, who co-owns Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

“She is talking to people, including many who probably have very different views from her own,” Ms. Szoka said of Ms. Jovin. “These are respectful and engaging conversations around our shared values and serve as an illustration of how art and language bring us together.”

[Katherine Rosman covers newsmakers, power players, and individuals making an imprint on New York City for the New York Times.  She joined the Times in 2014 and spent years writing for the Styles section, as well as for the Business pages and Culture desk.  She has also helped cover behind-the-scenes dynamics at the N.F.L.

[In the past year, Rosman has helped report on the tensions playing out in New York City, as they connect to the Israel-Hamas war.  She’s written about James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks and one of the most vilified people in New York, and has chronicled free-speech issues at universities.  Rosman has recounted a fight between billionaire Ray Dalio, a hedge fund founder, and millionaire Federico Pignatelli, an Italian prince and owner of Pier59 Studios, over a SoHo pergola and has detailed the end of Geraldo Rivera’s career at Fox News as she tagged along on a boat trip he and his brother took on the Erie Canal.

[Before moving to the Times, Rosman was a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal for a decade.  She’s the author of a memoir about her mother, If You Knew Suzy (Harper, 2010).]

*  *  *  *
“FILMMAKER BRANDT JOHNSON AND
GRAMMAR GURU ELLEN JOVIN
CHAT ABOUT REBEL WITH A CLAUSE, A NEW DOCU-COMEDY
ABOUT ELLEN’S POP-UP GRAMMAR ADVICE STAND
ON A ROAD TRIP ACROSS AMERICA”
by Russell Harper

[The transcript of the conversation below was posted on CMOS Shop Talk (a website of The Chicago Manual of Style, one of the U.S.’s most widely used-style guides) on 25 February 2025.]

Brandt Johnson and Ellen Jovin are cofounders of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm based in New York City. Ellen, an internationally acclaimed grammar and language expert, is the itinerant grammarian behind the Grammar Table, an informal pop-up advice stand that she launched in 2018 in Manhattan and has since taken to every state in the US. Brandt is the director of the new documentary film Rebel with a Clause. Before this project, he wrote and produced several plays and was the writer, director, and star of Brad Advice, a comedy web series.

Rebel with a Clause follows the adventures of Ellen’s Grammar Table and will have its New York City premiere on March 4 at the SVA [School of Visual Arts] Theatre in Manhattan. A book with the same title was published in 2022. The film is the subject of this exclusive interview with Shop Talk editor Russell Harper.

[The world premiere of the documentary Rebel With a Clause was on 10 January 2025 in Washington, D.C. at the Planet Word Museum, a language arts museum. Following that, the film had a New York City premiere on 4 March 2025, for National Grammar Day.]

Russell: Thank you, Ellen and Brandt, for making a pit stop to talk about this new documentary. Ellen, when CMOS interviewed you in 2022 about your book—which is also called Rebel with a Clause—the film was in postproduction. Or is it a movie?

Ellen: We are glad to be here, Russell—thank you. Either “film” or “movie” is fine. But the film is all Brandt’s doing; I stuck to conjugating things.

Brandt: It’s great to talk to you again, Russell! You can also call it a docu-comedy. It is, above all, meant to entertain.

Russell: Great to talk to both of you again—and to get an opportunity to learn more about your docu-comedy film/movie, which takes us on the road with the Grammar Table. You’ve now been to all fifty states with your grammar advice stand. Do you ever get tired, Ellen, of talking to strangers about grammar?

Ellen: Never. I’d already been talking about grammar for decades when the Grammar Table came into being. I will talk about grammar anytime, anywhere. I guess one thing I might get slightly tired of is people monologuing to me about how no one cares about grammar while I am literally sitting at a grammar advice stand that thousands of people have come up to of their own free will.

Russell: What about you, Brandt? Are you a grammar person also, or is that all Ellen?

Brandt: Ellen put me in the index [to her Grammar Table book] under apostrophes. That’s all I’m going to say.

Ellen: Yeah! The entry is “apostrophes, husband who knows how to use.” Brandt is totally grammarous. He even won the English award in his high school. He is also the one who more than thirty years ago taught me that not everyone pronounces “stalk” and “stock” the same way, which was total news to me. I didn’t believe him and had to go look it up.

Russell: I’ll remember that the next time I need celery stalks for my soup stock. So, which came first, the movie or the book? And did you have an idea of either one the first time you walked out the door and set up the Grammar Table?

Ellen: Absolutely not. I was in search of hedonistic grammar fun. I wanted to spend less time on the computer talking about grammar and more time in the open air talking about grammar. Even though I’d been trying to think of a good angle for a grammar book, for some reason the table didn’t occur to me as a book topic. It wasn’t until table visitors started saying “You should write a book about this!” that it bonked me in the head.

Brandt: When Ellen started out with the Grammar Table, I definitely wasn’t thinking of a movie. But after many hours observing what was happening at the table, just outside our building in New York, I really wanted to share it with a larger audience. I began filming less than three months after the start of the Grammar Table.

Ellen: And then I actually put Brandt’s plan to make a movie in my book proposal.

Russell: How did you pick the locations for the Grammar Table?

Ellen: In New York there are good locations everywhere. Above all, the Grammar Table needs foot traffic. The express subway stop at 72nd and Broadway was perfect, so that’s where I usually went at the beginning.

Brandt: Outside New York, we had to work harder to find pedestrians.

Ellen: The first task was to pick cities. Sometimes weather determined the city. For example, in Ohio we were planning to go to Cleveland, but it was raining, so we went to Toledo instead.

Brandt: In cities we didn’t know, we’d sometimes expect a spot was going to be just right for filming and then arrive and discover it wasn’t great after all. And we were also expelled from a few places. So then I’d maybe have to go off and look for another spot while Ellen stayed with the equipment, table, grammar books, and so on.

Ellen: Preferably in a nice café with excellent cappuccino.

Russell: Once you were set up and ready to film, did the presence of cameras—not to mention of Brandt himself (you played basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters, and you’re about six and a half feet tall, right?)—make it harder to get people to engage and be themselves?

Brandt: I think I look very friendly.

Ellen: Usually that’s true.

Brandt: And I don’t think people minded the camera, or me, very much. The volume of visitors didn’t change after I started filming. It stayed just as high. I had been worried about that—that having cameras would scare people off or alter the conversations—but mostly people seemed just as happy to talk about grammar with cameras as without.

Ellen: Yeah, and you might even have given me an air of professional legitimacy. I looked official with cameras around.

Russell: You’re certainly both Grammar Table pros by now. By the way, thank you for sharing a preview of your movie with me. The book may have the advantage when it comes to all the typographic details, but nothing beats watching it play out in real life. All those spontaneous conversations in the public square about apostrophes and spaces and past participles (not to mention Dutch and French and Tagalog [a language spoken in the Philippines; pronounced tuh-GAH-log]) are often funny and even moving. And the scenery—mountains, haystacks, beaches—also plays a big role. Did you intend from the beginning to make a portrait of America and not just a movie about grammar?

Brandt: It was important to me to let the story emerge as we experienced this road trip and as I edited the film. My intentions at the beginning of all of this were flexible. The US landscape made itself a central part of the story.

Ellen: Brandt is really observant about physical space. He spent hours getting B-roll of things I never noticed. I like seeing beautiful places too, but I’m not observant and can easily get lost just finding my way back from the bathroom.

[B-roll is supplemental or secondary video footage that’s used to enrich the main video (A-roll). It’s what viewers see when the narrator or character keeps speaking, but the visuals cut away to something else—like scenery, hands at work, product close-ups, or contextual action.]

Russell: I remember Brandt running out to get B-roll way back in Providence [in 2019, when I met Brandt and Ellen at the ACES [American Copy Editors Society] conference for copyeditors [sic], where CMOS also had a table]. Is this it for the Grammar Table, or will you be returning to the road at some point?

Ellen: I still go out with the Grammar Table! I love going out with the Grammar Table. My new dream is to get a grammarmobile, just to make roaming around the country a bit easier. We’re car-free Manhattanites.

Brandt: I plan to keep filming as we go around the country screening Rebel with a Clause. I already have my eye on a new camera.

Russell: How can others see Rebel with a Clause, and do you have any plans for a follow-up?

Brandt: We are screening the film in person and virtually for organizations around the country, we’re going to be showing it at festivals, and we are constantly adding new dates on our website.

Ellen: People can sign up for our mailing list if they want to be alerted about screenings. Also on our website is a form you can fill out to bring the film to your organization. We are even going to be showing the film at a boat club soon!

Russell: Will the movie be available for streaming?

Brandt: We don’t have any details about that yet, but we’ll announce them on our website as soon as we do.

Russell: In other words, be sure to check out rebelwithaclause.com for details and updates. In the meantime, thank you so much, Brandt and Ellen, for talking about your film.

Brandt: Thank you, Russell. Don’t forget that you are in the film, in footage from that ACES conference.

Russell: My first cameo! And here you are, almost six years later, with a book and a documentary that brings it all to life. I hope you and the Grammar Table will be around for a long time to come.

Ellen: There’s an awful lot of grammar left to discuss.

[Russell Harper is the editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A and was the principal reviser of the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of The Chicago Manual of Style.  He also contributed to the 8th and 9th editions of Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

Here’s a list of the posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing in some aspect or another.  As I said above, most only touch briefly on grammar specifically, but it’s always there in the background. 

    •  “Writing,” 9 April 2010
•  “‘GHOTI’” by Ben Zimmer, 7 December 2011
•  “Why Write?” 4 March 2013
•  “Words on Words,” 1 February 2014
•  “Four Worthies” by Kirk Woodward, 5 January 2016
•  “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” 28 July 2015
•  “More Words on Words,” 8 June 2016
•  “Nominalization” by Henry Hitchings, 25 January 2017
•  “Verbification,” 12 August 2018
•  “How I Write,” 25 February 2022
•  “Peter Elbow and Freewriting,” 12 March 2025
•  “Bad Writing,” Parts 1-5, 19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025
•  “Punctuation” by Sarah Boxer, 29 June 2025
•  “New Word Coinages” by Madison Malone Kircher and Callie Holtermann, 29 July 2025 

[There are also several posts on tangential subjects, including writers, playwriting, reviewing and topics less obviously connected to writing—but ROTters will have to seek those out for themselves.]

Punctuation

 

[This is a post about writing.   I taught writing for several years at several schools in the 1980s and ’90s and I also did some writing for publication, mostly about theater, many of which pieces have ended up revived here on Rick On Theater. 

[I’m firmly and unshakably convinced that the ability to write simply and clearly anything from an office memo to a Ph.D. dissertation to the latest journalistic exposé is still an absolute necessity in our world. 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will know, writing is a focus of mine.  I’ve taught it and blogged on it frequently.  While I was still teaching the subject, I collected articles from many sources on the subject of writing and teaching writing; a list of posts is included in my afterward to this post.]

 

“IN FINE PRINT,
PUNCTUATION TO PUNCTURE PEDANTS WITH”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Both of the articles compiled in this post are by the same author, Sarah Boxer.  The first one up is actually the second published.  It ran in the New York Times on 4 September 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”). 

[I call this post “Punctuation” because two of the subjects of the two articles are questions marks, below, and semicolons, in the second piece.  Boxer, however, also covers a couple of other elements of written documents in this article: the footnote and what she calls marginalia.]

If footnotes, quotations and marginalia, beloved by pedants and bores, were suddenly to vanish from the planet, you might say: “Yippee! Good riddance to all that received wisdom and tiny typeface. Farewell to the dutiful handmaidens of authority.” But not so fast.

Three scholars from three different fields have independently given these tools of scholarly oppression a revolutionary edge. Quotation marks, footnotes and marginalia aren’t just the voice of authority: they are actually the apparatus of subversion, sarcasm, irony and nastiness.

Consider the quotation mark. In the current issue of the journal “Critical Inquiry,” Marjorie Garber [b. 1944], the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and the director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, has an article called “ “ (Quotation Marks).

[Garber’s Critical Inquiry article (Vol. 25, No. 4 [Summer, 1999]: 653-679) is a little difficult to interpret by its title as it’s reproduced above.  On the title page of Critical Inquiry, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the university’s Department of English Language and Literature, it’s printed as:

“  ”
                        (Quotation Marks)

[In the running head, above the published text, the essay’s title is simply indicated as “  “.  (Ordinarily, the title of a published article or essay, when cited in another document, is written within quotation marks, as in “In Fine Print, Punctuation To Puncture Pedants With.”  The Times didn’t do this above—for obvious reasons, I think, because it would come out as: ““  ””.  (Also, conventionally, the period, which isn’t part of the title, but part of my sentence in this comment, would go inside the end quotation mark.  In this instance, that would just make this situation more confusing and absurd.  I think.)  

[In the bibliography on her résumé, Garber lists this essay as: “ ‘ ’ (Quotation Marks),” but I’d find that even more confusing because she (correctly) shifts the double QM’s of her title to single ones when they’re enclosed in the double QM’s of a cited title.  I’d imagine that if someone went to find her essay from that citation, say in a database or index, they’d look for something called ‘  ‘ (Quotation Marks) . . . and never find it!  Is a puzzlement!]

One of the “curious properties of these typographical signifiers,” she writes, is that “they may indicate either authenticity or doubt.” Sometimes quotations are meant to lend authority, Ms. Garber suggests, but the most general thing you can say is that they are reminders that words are borrowed things.

“In some ways quotation is a kind of cultural ventriloquism, a throwing of the voice,” she writes. Because “every quotation is a quotation out of context,” it can be a true copy and a false representation at the same time. It is “inevitably both a duplication and a duplicity.” A quotation mark can mean either “ ‘This is exactly what was said,’ or ‘Can you imagine saying or believing this?’”

Think of the sarcastic use of the phrase “quote-unquote”: “‘The mayor’s quote-unquote dedication to duty’ means the speaker doesn’t think the mayor is very dedicated,” Ms. Garber writes. Or think of its gestural equivalent, the “air quote,” or, in Ms. Garber’s words, the “Happy Talk finger-dance.” These gestures often suggest “a certain attitude – often of wry skepticism – about the authority of both the quotation and the quotee,” she writes. Some users call them “scare quotes,” she says, suggesting Jacques Derrida’s [1930-2004; French-Algerian philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction] idea that the words quoted are “under erasure” or somehow deficient.

It sounds very post-modern, doesn’t it? But irony was lurking in the quotation mark long before Mr. Derrida was in diapers. Ms. Garber quotes R. B. McKerrow’s [1872-1940; one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century] 1927 book “An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students,” (with respect, not sarcasm): “Inverted commas [the British term for quotation marks] were, until late in the 17th century, frequently used at the beginnings of lines to call attention to sententious remarks.” Early quotations were not even part of the main text, Ms. Garber writes. They were left “in the margins, as glosses or evidence of what was being claimed; sometimes they looked more like modern footnotes than like quotations.”

So quotations have their roots firmly planted in the soil of doubt. And that means they can take their place next to footnotes, which recently have come to be seen as tools of subversion, too. In “The Footnote: A Curious History” (Harvard University Press, 1997), Anthony Grafton [b. 1950; historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University], Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, calls footnotes “anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.” Sure, he concedes, they are generally regarded as marks of authority, like “the shabby podium, carafe of water, and rambling, inaccurate introduction which assert that a particular person deserves to be listened to.” But still, Mr. Grafton insists, footnotes are where all the fun is.

Edward Gibbon [1737-94; English essayist, historian, and politician] used one of his 383 footnotes in [The History of] [T]he Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776-89] to make fun of the too-literal theologian who castrated himself after reading the injunction to “disarm the tempter.”

And the footnotes in Pierre Bayle’s [1647-1706; French philosopher, author, and lexicographer] 1696 sleeper, the “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” Mr. Grafton writes, are filled with pornographic biblical interpretations and salacious stories, including “Caspar Scioppius’s [Caspar Schoppe (1576-1649); German catholic controversialist, philosopher and scholar] description of the sparrow he watched, from his student lodgings at Ingolstadt, having intercourse 20 times and then dying” – as well as Scioppius’s reflection: ‘O unfair lot. Is this to be granted to sparrows and denied to men?’”

To this day, Mr. Grafton suggests, footnotes are the “toilets and sewers” of historical writing, where all the rich waste materials are dumped. They don’t just back up the narrative, they also argue with it, destroying the idea that there is one true story. They “buttress and undermine at one and the same time.” So, you might conclude, footnotes are the height of subversion. Wrong again. Long before footnotes had their vogue in the 18th century, medieval artists invented a far more radical kind of marginalia.

In “Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art” (Harvard University Press, 1992) Michael Camille [1958-2002; British art historian, academic, and influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages], an art historian at the University of Chicago, tells the story of the “lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses” and copulating animals, populating the edges of illuminated manuscripts.

In the Middle Ages, the illuminator would do his work after the scribe was finished, Mr. Camille writes, and “that gave him a chance of undermining . . . the written word.” For example, in the Rutland Psalter of 1260, the illuminator colored the manuscript so that “the letter ‘p’ of the Latin word conspectu (meaning to see or penetrate visually)” turns into an arrow that flies into the posterior of a prostrate fish-man, Mr. Camille writes.

“The medieval image-word was, like medieval life itself, rigidly structured and hierarchical,” Mr. Camille writes. “For this reason, resisting, ridiculing, overturning and inverting it was not only possible, it was limitless.” The margins of illuminated manuscripts were a playground. By the close of the 13th century “no text was spared the irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem.”

From the look of the illuminated manuscripts, with their monkey-suckling nuns and bird-headed Jesuses, you can guess where footnotes and quotations get their subversive edge. The margins, Mr. Camille writes, were the place “not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition – what the scholastics called disputatio” and what we might call talking back.

There’s a lesson here: the marginal has always been marginal.

[Sarah Boxer is a writer of non-fiction and graphic fiction, and a former critic and reporter for the New York Times (1989-2006), where she covered various topics including photography, psychoanalysis, and art.  She has published three books: In the Floyd Archives (Pantheon, 2001), a cartoon novel based on Freud’s case histories, its post-Freudian sequel Mother May I? (Ipbooks, 2019) and the anthology Ultimate Blogs (OverDrive [e-book], 2008).  Boxer has also been a contributing writer at The Atlantic and has written articles, essays, and reviews for the New York Review of Books, the Comics Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Photograph, Slate, and Artforum.

[A propos of this article by Sarah Boxer, another piece, somewhat lighter of heart, appeared in the Times on 9 January 1994.  It wasn’t really an “article,” but a multi-footnoted comic strip, a put-on making fun of the proliferation and expansion of footnotes in academic—and non-academic—writing.

[The piece, entitled “The Annotated Calvin and Hobbes” by Eric P. Nash, who was a researcher for the New York Times for 25 years, where he wrote more than 100 articles.  It appeared in the Times in “Education Life” (Sec. A) at the end of the magazine as a section entitled “End Paper.”

[Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson [b. 1958] that was syndicated from 18 November 1985 to 31 December 1995.  At its height, it was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide and appeared in more than 50 countries.

[The strip follows six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, a tiger named Hobbes.  While seemingly simple, the comic often describes abstract topics.  Even the names of the titular characters draw upon philosophy; Calvin is named after the Swiss Protestant Reformer, John Calvin (1509-64; French theologian), and Hobbes is named after the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679; English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan).  References to philosophy continue throughout the comic.

[Unhappily, I can’t replicate it on the blog because it not only includes the strip itself, which Blogger makes hard to insert into posts (which is why I don’t do it often), but the typography comprises both fonts and symbols Blogger doesn’t have.  You see, “Annotated”’s footnotes have their own footnotes, each level of which gets smaller and the footnote markers become more and more idiosyncratic and eccentric.

[I can’t append Nash’s column to “Punctuation,” but the Times posts it on its website, but the digital version doesn’t reproduce the comic strip and only goes as far as the sixth note of the first level of annotation.  There are nine notes in the first level and four more levels below that, each one decreasing in font size (and increasing in silliness).  (Linked to the digital text is a PDF of the printed column and the page of the paper, but it’s hard to read and may only be available to Times subscribers.  New York Times articles are also available on databases like Proquest, which is accessible through most libraries and by subscription.]

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“THINK TANK:
IF NOT STRONG, AT LEAST TRICKY:
THE MIDDLEWEIGHT OF PUCTUATION POLITICS”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Boxer’s second article I’m reprinting on my blog was published in the New York Times on 6 March 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”).]

These days the semicolon, one of the least loved, least understood punctuation marks, barely ekes out a living between the period and the comma. It was not always that way.

Geoff Nunberg [1945-2020; lexical semantician and author], a researcher at Xerox, an adjunct professor at Stanford University and a consultant on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, has spent a lot of time thinking about the semicolon and its changing place in the world.

To understand the semicolon, said Mr. Nunberg in a recent lecture, you must first ponder written language in general. Is it merely a way to transcribe spoken language or does it have its own character? For Mr. Nunberg, the answer is clear.

Written language captures things that spoken language never could. Does anyone know, for example, what a semicolon sounds like?

Consider the sentence “Order your furniture on Monday, take it home on Tuesday.” With a comma, it means that if you order your furniture on Monday, you can take it home on Tuesday. “Order your furniture on Monday; take it home on Tuesday” is different, however; it is a double command. But sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the two sentences simply by hearing them read aloud. You need to see their punctuation to detect the difference.

If you look carefully, Mr. Nunberg said, the world of punctuation has its own rules of power politics. Commas are the weakest, semicolons are middleweight powers and colons are superpowers. Look more carefully and there is even a ranking among semicolons.

There are the weak ones (replaceable by “and,” “or” or “but”) and the strong ones (replaceable by words like “since” or “because” or even by a colon or a period.) But there is a strict law governing all of them. If there is more than one semicolon in a sentence, one cannot dominate. They must all be the weak type. There is parity.

This law of nondominance also governs the weakest type of semicolon, which Mr. Nunberg calls a “promotion” semicolon, a semicolon that would have been a comma if there were not already too many commas in the sentence. Here is an example: “He has written books on Tinker, the shortstop; Evans, the second baseman; and Chance, the first baseman.” In this sentence all semicolons are created equal, and they are all more equal than the commas.

There was not always such a restrictive, democratic order governing semicolons. Mr. Nunberg discovered that in the 19th century and early 20th century, semicolons were as loose and carefree as commas are now.

T. S. Eliot [1888-1965; American-born poet, essayist, and playwright who became a British citizen in 1927] used what is known as the appositional semicolon: “The essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world; a world which the author’s mind has subjected to a process of simplification.”

Jane Austen [1775-1817; English novelist] used semicolons to introduce subordinate clauses. In “Persuasion,” she wrote: “His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own.”

Mr. Nunberg even found writers who let their semicolons dominate other semicolons in the same sentence. In “Middlemarch,” George Eliot [pseud. Mary Ann Evans (1819-80); English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator] wrote: “But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself.” In that sentence, the second semicolon, working like a colon or period, dominates the first semicolon, which acts like a comma. How could she let that happen?

Did 19th- and early 20th-century writers sprinkle semicolons without any sense of propriety or limits? Or were there rules for semicolons that are obscure to us now? After looking at passages from T. S. Eliot, Henry James [1843-1916; American-British author], George Eliot and Jane Austen, Mr. Nunberg at last discovered the old law of the semicolon: A semicolon that wants to dominate another semicolon in the same sentence must wait for the end of the sentence; and then it can act like a colon, trumping the rest; the last semicolon gets the last laugh.

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[On 24 March 1996, Sarah Boxer published “Teachers, Teach Thyselves” in the New York Times (Section 4 [“Week in Review”], “Ideas & Trends”) which reported:

This month (4 March 1996) the National Council of Teachers of English released “Standards for the English Language Arts,” which outlined, in mind-numbing terms, what students from kindergarten to 12th grade should learn.  Tucked in it was a glossary that defined obscure words, such as “listening” and “spelling.”

[Boxer excerpted some passages—definitions of terms used in English and writing classes.  (Readers of Rick On Theater will know that I have taught writing and also a little English [high school].)  I’m going to excerpt Boxer’s excerpts, and republish a few pertinent definitions.]

audience  The collection of intended readers, listeners or viewers for a particular work or performance.

grammar  The means by which the different components of language can be put together in groups of sounds and written or visual symbols so that ideas, feelings and images can be communicated; what one knows about the structure and use of one's own language that leads to its creative and communicative use.

punctuation  An orthographic system that separates linguistic units, clarifies meaning and can be used by writers and readers to give speech characteristics to written materials.

spelling  The process of representing language by means of a writing system or orthography.

writing  1. The use of a writing system or orthography by people in the conduct of their daily lives to communicate over time and space. 2. The process or result of recording language graphically by hand or other means, as by the use of computers or braillers.

[The posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing are: Bad Writing (19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025), “Two Passings: Peter Elbow and Athol Fugard” (17 March 2025), “Peter Elbow and Freewriting” (12 March 2025), “How I Write” (25 February 2022). “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In” (28 July 2015), “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), and “On Reviewing” (22 March 2009).]