To Whom It May Concern
I generally get the who/whom distinction, but knowing the rules ain't the same as following them. Blogs are not research papers (as I guess you've noticed). Too often a "whom" or "whomever" sounds highfalutin.
So I often ask myself should I go with "who" and seem ignorant, or with "whom" and be thought a snob. I mostly use "who," unless I really feel it would stand out. Hopefully ("hopefully"--another lost cause), I'll never use a "whom" where a "who" should be, which would be the worst of both worlds.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:13 AM
3 Comments:
I don't know if the language police read this blog but I think your rational policy is going to piss off a lot of the Whoms in Whom-ville
I do hear the mistake when people fail to use who when it is the object of a preposition, but maybe I'm super sensitive. It just seems obvious that if you would use "me," you shuld use "whom":
This is from me / This is from whom?
Now if you want to sound like a snob, say "between you and I." This is incorrect, of course (it should be "between you and me"). But it sounds incorrect too, so to make this mistake, you have to be trying to sound erudite.
Funny that you think of it in terms of "me" DG. When in doubt I translate it mentally to "him" or "he" and if it has an "m" for one it should have it for the other. And I always (try to) use the correct one.
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