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.
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Appearances
It has been a long time since we last spoke. Both apostrophes, its tail was wagging, no apostrophe at all.
That's a funny example. In standard English, people typically will use an before a word beginning with a vowel, and they'll use a before a word beginning with the consonant. So the a versus an UFO example I included because often this is for the overthinkers, though.
This is for the overthinkers among us because I've seen people look at something like UFO, which literally on the page in writing begins with what we think of as a vowel. But the issue is not how it's spelled. The issue is how you say it. And when you say UFO, if you think about it, how do you pronounce the letter? When you say the letter U, it has a Y sound at the beginning.
Yeah, U. And that therefore requires a vowel in front. So a UFO.
Okay, I have a good one for you. People often ask me about sentences concluding in prepositions. And a preposition is one of these relationship words, like if you think of a desk, here are some prepositions. Over the desk, under the desk, near the desk, for the desk. So these are little relationship words.
And a lot of people, I'm including myself among those people, were taught when we were kids that we should not end with a preposition. So, you know, in the sentence, that's the woman I was telling you about. Some people will interrupt themselves mid-conversation or they'll rewrite their email so that it says something like, that is the woman about which I was telling you.
And it sounds very stilted. It's not a particularly natural structure for most of us. It doesn't really coincide with how we speak. But people will remember, oh, Miss Smith in eighth grade English taught me that, so I'm going to rearrange my sentence.
Um, and, and I have to, that's probably the one thing when I tell people that actually you can end with a preposition, if it feels appropriate and more natural to you. I mean, you don't need to seek it out every opportunity you get because some of them can be awkward in their own way, but often it's the best way to do things.
And you should get rid of that superstition from your childhood English classes and move along and get with the English program, which allows you to do that.
You are really getting right to the tough ones here. So a couple is what is known as a collective noun. It has a singular form. This is what it means. It has a singular form but refers to multiple entities. And people struggle so much with what to do especially with verbs that go with the word couple. So yes, no one's going to say, what was your sentence? I saw a couple.
No one's going to say, I saw a couple. It was nice, right? You can't do that. You can't refer, even though it's singular, you can't say it was nice. You have to say they. So there is a schism between the singular form of couple and then what you want to do with it later. Now, I would do what you did. I would switch to they.
Where this causes confusion mostly because most people just put they and not even think about it. But people argue about the verbs that go with couple. Would you say, let's see, the couple, that nice young couple is moving in next door. That nice young couple are moving in next door. A lot of Americans will say is automatically. And I probably would in that case too. But there's language variety.
If you cross the Atlantic and you're in the UK, you're going to be more likely to hear nouns like that used with plural verbs. That nice young couple are moving in next door.
Absolutely. There's always going to be a tension between generations, you know, so we grow up, we have our own slang. We speak in a certain way. We're used to certain things. There are, I don't know, educational trends that affect how we're taught. And we grow up and then things evolve. You know, young people don't want the slang of the generation above them. They want their own.
They have their own way of speaking. And there are always going to be little gaps demographically between different groups. I think it's actually really interesting and fun. And it's something that for me keeps English being an adventure.
It does seem to have enduring power. I used that when I was a teenager and I still use it.
I can't personally verify that, but it is one of the... Well, here's the thing. A lot of times, I think it's important to recognize our own limitations and knowing what our usage actually is. This happens to me a lot. Someone will say to me, I never do XYZ. Like on Twitter, what's interesting about Twitter, someone will say, I never use XYZ in this way.
But then, not that I do this a lot, but I have done it. You can use the Twitter feature... to find an example instantly in their own tweets that contradicts what they just said.
So people think they know what they do, and some are very self-aware and are probably pretty well informed about what they do, but others just think they know what they're doing because they remember what they were told in school and they think they're following it, but they're not necessarily.
And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I think in analyzing our own language use, we need to... Remember that those words that are tumbling out of us every single day, all day long for some of us, we don't always know exactly what we just said.
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