Ellen Jovin
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Ellen Jovin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I get asked a lot about effect and effect. The one with the E is a noun and the one with an A is a verb. So, your behavior affects me, that would be an A. Your behavior has an effect on me would be an E. All this today on Something You Should Know.
Thank you, Mike. I'm so happy to be here.
One of the complications with English is that there is just a ton of variety. That's what you get with a global language, many different dialects spoken by people who don't actually always have contact with one another. And it's one of the things that I find exciting and adventurous about the English language.
Further and farther is an interesting one for me because I ran into a person in Maryland when I was sitting at my pop-up traveling grammar advice stand, and she was very angry about that. She didn't like that people said further when they meant For distance, for physical distance, she wanted them to use farther. And so that was an example for her of a nails on a chalkboard kind of thing.
The reality for me, I definitely do not care about that one. And in fact, if you go look it up, you can see that further is used often and has been historically for both physical distances and for metaphorical distances. Like, for example, I went further down the block. I investigated the matter further. I could do both of those, even though the sense is slightly different.
But some purists will insist on using farther for anything where you can kind of measure it with a ruler.
Yeah, there's a lot of discussion about that. I talk to an awful lot of people about lie down and lay down. And In a lot of people's sort of natural dialects they grow up speaking, they just use lay down in cases where I, for example, would use lie down. I need to lay down for a bit. There I would say lie down. They're both words that begin with L. They're short. They sound the same.
You use to lay when you have an object. he should lay that down on the picnic table versus he should lie down. So the one with lay has an object, a thing right after it that is being acted upon. In casual speech, even very sophisticated people, actually not just casual speech, writing too, very, very sophisticated people often can't remember the difference.
And I've met plenty of advocates for just, oh, just get rid of it. Let's just have it be one word so we can stop worrying about it.
I actually have trouble with this because I was raised to say, I am well. You're supposed to say well because that tells about your health, your well-being, that kind of thing. Whereas if you say I'm good, it's like proclaiming that you're morally good. So that was a big deal when I was a kid. It just doesn't really match up with how people use these things. I think now I am well.
can sound pedantic to a lot of people, especially in the younger half of the population. So I often reply with things like, I'm doing well, or I'm fine, thanks, how are you? So I kind of avoid the different choosing between those. I can't say, because of my childhood, I just can't say, I'm good. It just doesn't feel comfortable for me because I would feel as though it's an error.
I don't think that there is a daily minimum requirement for semicolons. I do use them. I'm kind of attached to the semicolon. And in fact, I sometimes look over my email before I send when I look over my email before I send it. I sometimes have to take out a semicolon or two because I can go a little bit crazy. I'll even use a semicolon in a tweet.
But the most common place for them is between what could be two complete sentences. So in a place where you could put a period, but you want to bring them more closely together, they're related ideas, and you just want the pause between them to be less stark so that people connect them more in their brains. And there can be a certain kind of quiet suspense to the semicolon, I think. I like it.
Well, colons are funny because most often in normal daily life, the way people would use them is in front of a list and not in front of all lists. For example, I might say she ordered three items, books, Desks and what should my third one be? Ping pong tables. You know, the usual list. So on the left of that colon, you have three items and on the right of the colon, you have the three items.
There's almost like an equivalency happening there. You can also do that kind of thing when you have.
dramatic this is a more I think literary use and people should be cautious about this but sometimes you'll see a sentence colon and then another sentence and often it's kind of a tada this is a big deal like I'm setting this up for you here we are we're arriving at this dramatic second piece but I don't recommend people play around with that too much unless they read and get us you know they read and they get a sense of
of how experienced authors are doing it. It's mostly a more banal list kind of thing.
Do we need to put you on an apostrophe diet?
Well, what's confusing about it's with the apostrophe is that usually when we think apostrophe, well, in many cases, we think possessive. Like if I say Mary's It would be Mary apostrophe S chair, the chair of Mary. But these possessive forms of pronouns, that's what you have with it or hers or theirs or ours. With those, there are no apostrophes.
And the it's works similarly, like its tail was wagging. No apostrophe. So in that case, you if you have an apostrophe and then it's it's going to it's see there right that second I just used one. It's going to be a contraction. So either for it is. or it has. So here, I'll give you two examples. It's raining, I-T apostrophe S, raining, or it's been a long time since we last spoke.
Showing 1–20 of 47 · page 1 of 3
Next →