From a Gail Collins op-ed piece in the NYT (2/24/11, p. A27), “Revenge of the Pomeranians”:
Also, why is the federal government in danger of shutting down? Whom can I blame for this? Does it have anything to do with what’s going on in Wisconsin? Did Congress pass a budget last year at all? Why not?
The whom caught my eye. It’s prescriptively “correct”, since the lexeme WHO is serving here in an object function (in this case, it’s the direct object of blame), but still it was jarring to me, especially in the context of Collins’s breezy and informal style. (Not that Collins was necessarily responsible for the whom in this column; it might have been introduced by an editor.)
Earlier discussion of such cases here, in connection with this passage in the NYT:
As Mr. Netanyahu was fond of saying [of Israeli proposals for Palestine], you can call that a state if you wish, but whom are you kidding? (Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, “The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything”, NYT op-ed piece, 8/11/09, p. A17)
Some more items from my file of passages where a “correct” whom in object function struck me as somewhat discordant:
So whom would you choose as your musical dream date for this Götterdämmerung moment: the chaste nun-in-training who loves nature and children, or the sexy nightclub singer who loves a cabaret? (Ben Brantley’s theater column, NYT 1/20/07, p. A15)
To anyone whom limited space and memory have caused me to omit, please forgive me and know that I am thankful. (Jabari Asim, acknowledgments for The N Word, p. vii)
The two most authoritative collections [of hadith, the sayings and doings of Muhammad], Rowson says, don’t mention sodomy. In the remaining four, the most important citation reads: “Those whom you find performing the act of the people of Lot, kill both the active and the passive partner.” (Nadya Labi, “The Kingdom in the Closet”, The Atlantic May 2007, p. 80)
An inventory of postings on who vs. whom in Language Log and this blog can be found here. The most important material is in the first seven sections of “Whom shall I say [ ___ is calling ]?” (here), where I explain two systems of case marking for WHO (distributing Form1, variously called nominative, subjective, or subject case, and Form2, variously called accusative, objective, or object case): the older Prescriptive System (still taken by many to to be the “correct”, indeed the only correct, system), which I’ve elsewhere called System A, and the newer Standard System (which has been spreading at least since Shakespeare’s time, to the point where usage critics were already concerned in the 19th century that whom was “disappearing”), which I’ve elsewhere called System B.
In System A, Form2 of WHO is associated with object function (though with several important complexities), while in System B, Form2 of WHO is used for an object (of a preposition or a verb) only when WHO is actually in construction with its governor. (Details in the “Whom shall I say” posting. An especially important detail is that case marking for WHO is not entirely parallel to case marking for definite personal pronouns like HE.)
A fair number of speakers shift between the two systems on stylistic grounds, using System B generally but shifting to System A in contexts they believe call for an extremely formal style — yielding what I’ll call System A/B. Doing this requires some judgment as to which contexts call for System A, and different people have different takes on the matter, so the way is open for differing assessments of the results. I’m a pretty consistent System B user, so I’m likely to find some occurrences of whom (from users of System A or A/B) discordant in their contexts.
Usage advice tends to be deaf to all these complexities and subtleties and to fall back on unexamined dogma about case marking. Take, for example, the treatment of who vs. whom in Grammar Sucks (hereafter, GS) by Joanne Kimes with Gary Robert Muschla (pp. 151-6), which I talked about in an earlier posting.
[Note: I am about to trash a piece of this advice book, not because I’m against giving advice about grammar, usage, and style — quite the contrary — but because I object to bad and unhelpful advice, especially when it’s based on fallacious assumptions and delivered in a patronizing tone.]
GS‘s exposition on who and whom is framed by an insulting irrelevancy:
This dastardly duo of pronouns are [I would have used is, but let that pass] responsible for more confusion than the transgender movement of the 1980s. (p. 151)
and continues:
… as confusing as these two ponderous pronouns can be, there is no reason to worry your pretty little head. [how patronizing is that?] For once again, I’m here for you and will teach you a simple trick of the trade that will help you determine which pronoun to use. Since who is a subjective case pronoun, it can be used in the same types of constructions that he, she, and they can. (He, she, and they are subjective case pronouns.) Since whom is an objective case pronoun, … (p. 152)
Well, you can see where this is going. It assumes that WHO and the definite personal pronouns follow the same scheme of case marking (though this is not so even in System A, and it is dramatically not so in System B) and that this scheme aligns the cases straightforwardly with syntactic functions (perhaps via a bit of verbal magic in which subjective and objective cases are by definition aligned with subject and object functions). These are all hypotheses, requiring some demonstration, but in GS they’re just asserted as truths.
Then we get to
Who did you send the package to?
At a first glance, most people would find this sentence to be just peachy keen. [oh, spare us the cutesy tone!] In fact, if this question were on the SATs, most people would only warrant a score worthy of a local community college. [and spare us the social put-downs!] For in truth, the sentence is incorrect. In it, the prepositional phrase is split, the preposition to being placed at the end of the sentence (more on why you should never do this — at least on the SATs — in chapter 14 [yes, that old usage superstition that “preposition at end” is incorrect!]) Although the construction is very common today in both informal and formal conversation and writing, it doesn’t mean that you can use who. You still must use whom because an objective case pronoun is needed. (pp. 153-4)
Wrong is wrong, and right is right, no matter what.
Remember that this is supposed to be advice for people who need it — to succeed in school, on the job, at work, and in social relations. So the conclusion of this section is especially remarkable; after working through parallels between who/whom and he/him, GS insists on whom rather than who in
I wonder ___ Bill contacted.
and sums up:
If you didn’t get that one …, don’t be too hard on yourself. I said at the beginning of this section that the whole who/whom thing is confusing. But maybe you were okay with the transgender thing of the early ’80s since things do have a way of evening themselves out in the end. Just be patient, and when in doubt, use who. Not that it’ll be correct, but most people substitute who for whom [the verb substitute is telling here] and only the geniuses in grammar ever know the difference. [then why the hell are we getting this advice?] Besides, you have a fifty-fifty chance of being right. Sure, people who use who and whom correctly are distinguished from the crowd [so superiority, not competence and effectiveness, is the point of the exercise], but they’re often made fun of behind their backs. [“Whom ya gonna call? WHOBUSTERS!] Like I said, things have a way of evening themselves out in the end [I still don’t get the moral lesson that GS is trying to teach here]. (pp. 155-6)
Laugh, weep, or rage — take your pick. I’m going for rage right now.
March 1, 2011 at 1:23 pm |
Whom do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?
March 1, 2011 at 2:57 pm |
Love(r)ly. Of course System B has been long identified with vernacular, “sloppy”, non-standard speech, despite the facts of elite usage. In any case, “Whom do you think you are kidding?” would be just absurd, as would have been “Whom Do You Trust” for the name of a 1950s tv show.
March 1, 2011 at 2:04 pm |
Wow, that was fun. In your terms I prefer the prescriptive system when writing and sometimes when speaking; but though I recognize the “wrongness” of standard system usage that prefers “who” to “whom”, I can live with it and use it myself in speech. But each of the examples demonstrating incorrect “whom” in your lengthy Language Log explanation felt wrong to me instinctively. (In my thinking I have always used subjective / objective to decide which is correct, but I guess I have always been pretty good at picking the clause that who[m][ever] belonged to.) Anyhow, I never saw the issues of “who[m]” deconstructed to this level before.
“To whom are you referring, sir?” “Youm, that’s whom!”
March 1, 2011 at 3:04 pm |
Just a reminder: the examples I collected with “whom” were all prescriptively “correct” (but you knew that). What’s interesting is that you seem to share my unease with them. Looks like there are some shared values here that cut across our actual usage.
March 1, 2011 at 11:25 pm
I don’t know if unease is what I feel, but I do notice these and often stop to check that they are correct. The examples I recognized as “incorrect” (prescriptively) were from “Whom shall I say [ ___ is calling ]” sections 9-11 or so.
March 2, 2011 at 7:49 am |
“Since who is a subjective case pronoun, it can be used in the same types of constructions that he, she, and they can.”
That strikes me as preposterous right there. Seems to me most constructions that use who or whom are not constructions where you could use he, she, or they, or him, her, or it. And even “Who is going?” I do not personally see as the same construction as “He is going.”
March 3, 2011 at 7:06 am |
Yes, it can take some contortion to construct the definite personal pronoun counterparts to the examples with WHO; you have to “undo” the extraction of WH elements.
March 2, 2011 at 8:36 am |
Wow. Somebody has some issues with transgender folks – I really can see no point at all in that being there except to gratuitously insult people.
However, I must say that in the hadith example (“Those whom you find performing the act of the people of Lot, kill both the active and the passive partner.”) the whom feels proper. This may be because it lends the whole sentence a combined archaic/translated air of spurious authority, or it may just fit with the rest of its stiffness (“the act of the people of Lot”).
March 3, 2011 at 7:11 am |
Good point on the hadith example. The very formal, indeed archaic, style of the quotation probably justifies the whom.
March 2, 2011 at 10:11 am |
[…] Arnold Zwicky's Blog A blog mostly about language « Object whom […]
April 25, 2011 at 9:03 am |
[…] be stylistically much more natural (discussion of some other cases of “Object whom“ here): Jackie [a man] wants to make love, but Veronica has something on her mind. She’s been seeing […]
April 18, 2012 at 9:51 am |
[…] function. The earlier prescriptive standard (what I call System A in my “Object whom” posting) turns out to be difficult for people to master; people are inclined to use whom in more places […]
November 11, 2024 at 11:34 am |
I apologize for commenting on a post that’s over ten years old but I discovered this blog much later (I was all but 8 years old when this was originally posted.) I hope I have something useful to add as a native speaker of something in between system A and B.
This is a general summary of my usage before I ever learned anything about the prescriptively correct distinction or even knew what the grammatical terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ meant. I almost always used ‘whom’ according to the system B rules (I say ‘almost always’ because I don’t remember if I’ve been 100% consistent with post-verbal usage and I discovered one unusual instance where I wrote ‘by who?’ though it could have been a typo.) My rules for system A are as follows: extracted objects of verbs and prepositions in main clauses almost always take ‘who’ (I also discovered one exception to this in my usage, so again I say ‘almost.’) Extracted objects of verbs and prepositions in subordinate clauses take ‘who’ or ‘whom’ in pretty much free variation and they are both of neutral style. So there’s a really big difference for me between “Whom can I blame for this?” and “To anyone whom limited space and memory have caused me to omit…” The first is ungrammatical and the second is completely natural. With the exception of rare ESOC cases, I never used ‘whom’ in any ways that could be considered nonstandard (I can say this confidently). I don’t remember any switching based on register.
Is this system significant enough among English native speakers to have its own category?
November 11, 2024 at 12:29 pm |
You are hereby excused for having taken so long to respond to this posting; I suspect I’ve never had any 8-year-old readers (though I’ve had the occasional canny observations from the small children of linguists). On your actual question: there’s a gigantic assortment of systems in actual practice, caused by competition between systems A and B, people’s behavior with respect to ISOC and ESOC, and differences in how the choice of forms is associated with register, style, and the context of utterance. On top of all that, self-reporting on usage in these things is, unsurprisingly, fraught with problems, so I’m pleased to see you riffling through your own writing to see what you actually do (as opposed to what you think you might do).
So the facts are mind-bogglingly complex, but not utterly incomprehensible. You can figure out bits of your patterns, and large-scale data studies can be done (I don’t have the resources to do this sort of research, but I have colleagues who do).
(Meanwhile, if I understand you correctly, you are now about 21 — since you were 8 in 2011. A good age for a Random Grammar Lizard to be thinking about such things.)
November 11, 2024 at 12:50 pm |
Wow. I hadn’t remembered this from 13+ years ago, but clearly I not only read it with interest then, I dove at least part way down the rabbit hole (and am trying really hard not to do so now, for lack of time). Congratulations to the RG Lizard on finding such a topic and so appropriate to the moniker.