One day many years ago, I had my nose
buried in an English usage text when I came across a passage that made my heart
leap.
As a junior faculty member at the
University of Missouri, I was desperately seeking ways to insert some
rudimentary knowledge of grammar into my copy-editing students.
Their brains were empty, poor dears,
vacuum-packed wastelands when it came to any notion of grammar, and they hated
with the fire of a thousand suns my attempts to fill the void.
They had come to Missouri to learn to be
reporters, for Chrissakes, the next generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins, not
to endure lectures about pronoun-antecedent agreement and when to use “that” or
“which.”
First and best editors
They sat sullen-faced as I distributed my
homemade study sheets and responded with stony silence to my mantra, “All
writers must be their first and best editors, and you can’t be a good editor
without knowing grammar!”
That’s how I came to be spending a
perfectly splendid Midwest autumn afternoon immersed in a scholarly explanation
of the proper use of the relative pronouns who
and whom.
Until my appointment as a journalism
instructor at Missouri, I had never given much thought to the matter. My own
formal knowledge of the grammar rules governing who and whom – or any
grammar point, really – was as paltry as that of my students.
In my own writing, I had used the “ear
test” to determine which pronoun to use in any particular circumstance, a
procedure about as reliable as foretelling the affection of your significant
other by plucking petals off a daisy. Even so, my choices had rarely been
challenged by editors so I figured my instincts were fairly solid on the
subject.
I sensed, however, the skeptical reception
this seat-of-the-pants approach to grammar would receive from my students. That
and a sincere devotion to the craft of writing prompted me to explore the
doctrine of the grammar priesthood on the matter of who vs. whom and the
parallel constructions whoever and whomever.
Universal confusion
To my surprise and relief, I found that
confusion over the right usage is damned near universal and misuse so pervasive
that there have been significant sentiments for more than 150 years to ban the
cursed whom entirely.
On the face of it, the rules seem simple
enough. Who is the nominative case and
whom is the objective.
To use a well-known example, John Donne’s
immortal “ask not for whom the bell tolls…” is correct because whom is the object of the preposition from. The rule states that the relative pronoun
following a preposition is always objective, except when it’s not. (More on
that later.)
Some other examples:
Who
deserves the ice cream?
(Who is the subject so it takes the
nominative case.)
To
whom should I give the ice cream?
(As above, the word following a
preposition takes the objective [most of the time], so whom is correct.)
I
can’t imagine anyone who loves writing would ever be bored by grammar.
(Who
is the subject (nominative) of the clause who
loves writing.)
Whom
should I invite for dinner?
(Whom is the object of the verb invite so the objective is correct.)
Clear as a bell, right? Well, yes, as long
as the sentences are simple and direct.
Firm foundation
When they get more complex, with clauses
and phrases darting this way and that, it becomes harder to determine the right
usage. That’s particularly true if – like my students and me – you don’t have a
firm grammatical foundation from which to operate.
Benjamin Dreyer tries to be helpful in Dreyer’s English, his delightful book on
how to write with style and clarity.
“If you can remember to think of
‘who’ as the cousin of ‘I,’ ‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘they’ (the thing doing the
thing, a.k.a. a subject) and to think of ‘whom’ as the cousin of ‘me,’ ‘him,’
‘her,’ and ‘them’ (the thing being done to, a.k.a. an object), you’re most of
the way there,” says Dreyer, copy chief of Random House.
But nothing is ever that simple, is it?
Take the seemingly straightforward rule
that whom is always used after a
preposition. That’s not always the case. When the prepositional clause is the
object of the sentence, the relative pronoun following the preposition could very
well be the nominative who.
For example:
I
shall give an A to whoever can explain the rules of grammar to me.
Any normal person, which is to say anyone
blissfully unaware of the mysteries of grammar, would assume the proper usage
is “to whomever can explain.” Here’s where the spider says to the unsuspecting
fly, “Welcome to my web.”
In this case, the entire phrase is the
object of the preposition. So the proper pronoun is who since it is the subject of the verb explain.
Want to try another one? Or should we just
retreat to the nearest bar for tequila shots?
The
referees in the Super Bowl differed about who caught the ball in the end zone.
Once again, at first glance, the obvious
choice is whom, since it follows the
preposition about and takes the
objective. But in fact, the phrase who
caught the ball is the true object of the preposition. Who is correct for the reason explained above.
Urge to scream
After plowing through a few pages of this
kind of stuff on that fall day 35 years ago, I had to stifle the urge to scream.
That’s when I came across in one dusty tome the reluctant acknowledgement that the use of whom
might be headed for the dustbin of history. It would be, I thought, a funeral
with few mourners.
William and Mary Morris, authors of the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage,
credited the exile movement to the unending “confusion arising from the use and
misuse of whom.”
“Not long ago,” they wrote, “one writer on
matters linguistic seriously proposed that whom
be banished from the language, presumably in large part to ease his pain at
seeing it so often misused.”
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English
Usage points out that grammarians have been arguing since the mid-18th
century about the who-whom construction
and whether exceptions to the rule are acceptable and under what circumstances.
“There
is a certain disparity,” it admits, “between the way who and whom are supposed
to be used and the way they are actually used.”
Merriam-Webster illustrates the point with
a number of passages from Shakespeare in which the world’s greatest playwright technically
gets it wrong.
From Macbeth:
Macbeth: … For certain friends that are both his and mine.
Whose
loves I may not drop, but wail his fall
Who
I myself struck down.
(It should be, Whom I myself struck down. Whom
receives the action of being struck down, thus the objective case.)
From King
Lear:
Albany: Run, run, O, run!
Edgar: To
who, my lord? Who has the office?
(To whom,
object of the preposition.)
Now, if a guy whose work has lasted 400
years can’t get it right, what chance do the rest of us have? Perhaps the
better question is: If a writer for the ages routinely flaunts the rule, do we mere
mortals really need it?
Even the most punctilious of grammarians
admit the battle already has been lost in speech, where whom rarely is used in any construction, largely because it sounds
affected and phony sophisticated to most ears.
It sounds particularly out of key when
it’s used, even correctly, at the beginning of a sentence.
For example:
Whom
shall I invite to the party?
Whom
are you going to prom with?
Neither sentence sounds right to the
unerring Gunnels ear, although grammatically they are.
William Safire, who wrote a column on
language for The New York Times for
many years, agreed that using whom at
the beginning of a sentence “comes across as an affectation.”
“What is comfortable to the listener’s ear
is to be preferred in address,” he wrote.
Wiggle room
Theodore Bernstein, former copy chief of The Times, a stout defender of the who-whom distinction in writing, also is
willing to give the speaker some wiggle room.
“It is understandable, therefore, that the
spontaneous speaker, unable to take the time for the analysis, will
occasionally err,” he wrote in The
Careful Writer.
How long can the stubborn whom hang on in written English?
“Our files show,” Merriam-Webster said,
“that objective whom is in no danger
of extinction, at least in writing.”
Dreyer agrees. “The reports of the imminent
death of the word “whom” … are greatly exaggerated,” he said, “so you’d do well
to learn to wield it correctly or, at least and perhaps more important, learn
not to wield it incorrectly.”
Alas and alack. There you have it.
Faced with the ambiguity my research into
the who-whom conundrum had unearthed,
I proceeded with my grammar lecture to my Mizzou J-students. They received my
hard-won knowledge with typical insouciance.
Today, I continue to observe the
distinction, dutifully correcting misuse in the copy I edit and observing the
rules as best I can in my own. Until the grammar gods decree otherwise, I’m
stuck, as a professional, with a difficult rule to obey, but a rule
nonetheless.
