In Monday’s Atlanta Urinal and Constipation someone wrote the following vent.
I’m 65 and I still don’t know when to use who or whom.
Are you bragging or complaining? I would not admit my ignorance of how to decline pronouns. We’re lucky that in English, unlike Russian or Latin, we don’t have to decline all of our nouns or unlike in the Romance languages, our nouns don’t have gender.
Even professional “journalists” don’t know when to use who or whom and their editors don’t know either. I see poorly written English on a daily basis. You would think that “journalists”, who have layers and layers of fact checkers and editors, unlike bloggers, could get this stuff right. Nope. They are no better than this ignoramus venter bragging about his ignorance of pronoun usage.
Who is the nominative case (subject or predicate nominative) just like I, he, she, and they. Whom is the objective case (direct object or object of a preposition) as is me, him, her, and them.
This would also go right over the head of this venter who prolly slept through all of his English classes. Do they still diagram sentences in middle school English classes?
Take a few semesters of Latin and you’ll see how lucky we are that we only have to decline pronouns.
Shit, they don’t even teach cursive in some schools anymore.
I saw a few weeks back that “whom” is disappearing from the language. Most people just use “who” in all cases. Sadly,
correct grammar is not the only area where we are experiencing a rapid decline. Also, most people (uninformed voters) don’t know enough history to see where we are headed!!
“Do they still diagram sentences in middle school English classes?”
No, they haven’t done that it years. You’re a dinosaur, Denny, just like the rest of us.
I went to elementary school in Japan, Utah, California,and Italy. Never once did we diagram sentences. The first time I ever saw it was in a college class after I got out of the army. As to Who vs Whom goes I have found no need for a rule. If it sound correct it usually is. For whom the bell toll, Who do you love? I find that most people using whom are only trying to sound educated and most often they
prove the opposite.
I always thought the who/whom issue was similar to the you/you’ll or ya’ll issue.
Who refers to singular, whom refers to plural.
Or, use the he/him method:
he = who
him = whom
Examples:
Who/Whom wrote the letter?
He wrote the letter. Therefore, who is correct.
For who/whom should I vote?
Should I vote for him? Therefore, whom is correct.
Willie. Nope. It has absolutely nothing to do with singular or plural since both he and him are singular. The plural would be they and them. In your first example he and who are the subject, therefore it is the nominative case. In your second example whom and him are the object of the preposition for, hence they are the objective case.
Shortly before I retired from the local university (English, drama, poetry, et al.), I attended the annual discussion on textbooks. Consensus amongst publishers of style and grammar manuals was that the who/whom issue will be relegated to the dustbin of history before long and whom will go the way of manual ribbon typewriters.
One even said that a movement is forming to do away with the apostrophe. Why? For the same reason that teaching the subjunctive mood, passive voice, and sentence diagramming were abandoned: students resist it, and it takes too much time to get it across in class.
My English/Latin teacher used to line us up along the chalk board and drill us on grammar. He would sit at a desk, cradling an armful of erasers which he had previously loaded with chalk dust. If you got an answer right, you could return to your desk undisturbed. Wrong answers drew a barrage of eraser fire that left the student covered in chalk. The teacher was very accurate in his aim. Nobody was ever hurt, that I know of; we had fun, and even the slowest kid in class learned. I doubt a teacher could get away with that today.
Peggy – The school system would be sued and the teacher would be fired, unless he was a union teacher and then he would be reassigned to a rubber room and still draw his salary.
Christ. “Whom” = object. “Who” = subject. How hard is that?
Except people don’t get the idea of predicate nominatives and think that any word that follows a verb is an object. That is why people say “It’s me” instead of “It’s I.” “It’s me” is now so prevalent that a French person I know told me that he was taught to say “It’s me” instead of “It’s I”.
We were taught that if it “renames” the antecedent, then it should have the same case.
It is something of an argument for learning a foreign language. Languages most certainly don’t all play by the same rules, but they all require some sort of structure. Understanding the grammar of your native language helps you to identify the analogous constructs in others.
Taking Latin approved my English grammar. Also, it improved my vocabulary of English words with Latin roots.
Roger,
Interestingly, “who do you love?” was one of the examples given in the article about the loss of “whom” in the language. In this sentence “you” is the subject of the verb (do) “love” and “who” is the object, which means “whom” is the correct form. If you wish to use how it sounds in a question, rearrange the sentence to “you love who” or “you love whom”. It is easier in this form to see whom is required as the object. I am not an English teacher nor majored/minored in English, but came from a time when correct language was stressed in high school!
People don’t read enough! One learns a language by reading, more than once, the Great Masters of its Literature.
C’est vrai, c’est vrai.
Among the things I told my creative writing students was “To write well you must first read what is written well.”
You tell us how to use “who” and “whom”, and then, in the very next sentence, use “prolly”. Golly.
Yep! I also use gonna, yannow, and other colloquialisms.