This is my best abstract for Advanced Editing yet, if I do say so myself!
I read “Who You Callin’ Ungrammatical?” by Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe and looked at Paul Brians’ “List of Common Errors in English” page.
I admit I read the Globe article because I use the word whom and am against its demise. I’m not so pedantic that I correct people if they use one when they should have used the other, but I use whom in my writing and even in my speech because I like being correct and as specific as possible.
However, once I really thought about it, I decided it may just be time for whom to go. After all, we don’t say thou or shan’t anymore — English evolves.
This is the gist of the Globe article. It was written in response to a reader complaining about a headline: ”Who are you calling working class?” The reader argues that it should have been ”Whom are you calling working class?” and technically, he or she is right. But even the newspaper staff there thought this was a silly claim, and they found some people who study English and agree: ”Beginning a question with whom in contemporary standard English would not just be unusual, it would be bizarre,” says linguist Geoffrey Pullum, coauthor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. ”Insisting on whom, as some people still do when writing for print, is more and more looking like an affectation.”
Even worse, I think, than not using whom when it should have been used is using it when it should not have been. Possibly in an effort to adopt the affectation Pullum describes, I’ve heard and read people throw a whom into a sentence incorrectly, presumably because they think it makes them sound smart. I’ve seen the same thing happen with the usage of I in a compound objective case: “This could not be a prouder moment for him and I.” A Globe reader who responded to the other reader’s initial complaint noted that the hypercorrect whom ”is the blind spot of literate Americans.”
Paul Brians’ “List of Common Errors in English” is very extensive and a good resource, and, considering the other article I read, I decided to look at his who/whom entry.
He offers the standard explanation that who is used in the subjective case and whom is used in the objective case, but he also goes further and includes his own analysis, which I like. Brians brings up much the same argument as the Globe article in that he says whom isn’t really used to begin a sentence any longer, and in many cases, it just comes off as being showy.
I like this helpful tip he gives: “Just try the ‘he or him’ test, and if it’s still not clear, go with ‘who.’ You’ll bother fewer people and have a fair chance of being right.”
