Campus Officials Fight a ‘Wacky’ Web Site

You conclude on the basis of one example that the “whom” words are making a “creeping return”, but in the wrong places.  Have you ever heard of the recency illusion?  Hypercorrect use of “whom” goes back at least as far as the King James Bible’s “Whom do men say that I am?”.

I am guilty of being snooty. To whomever I speak, I continue to use the accusative case of our beloved interrogatory pronoun “who.” I also take off points when I correct student papers when they fail to use whom. (My students in Intermediate Exposition, by the way, are mostly Latinos who speak English as a second language, many of whom are undocumented.) If you do it consistently enough, it becomes a signature piece, like wearing a strange orange hat or using suspenders.

As for Nick Kristoff, I suppose his grammatical mistake would be shocking, had I not concluded a very long time ago that the New York Times opinion editorialist is among the least intelligent creatures of the species Homo Sapiens. His co-workers are Maureen Dowd and David Brooks, for Heaven’s sake. What is more depressing is the 46% figure, since I am not one of these spineless Burkean conservatives who can live with Mitt Romney as our nominee. I will not vote for “whomever we nominate”; I will vote for ABR — anybody but Romney. If it’s Romney v. Obama I am joining Occupy Wall Street for it is time that “whoever” finds domination by an Ivy League cartel problematic go out and start a revolution.

It is interesting that you started with an example of written prose, but much of the rest of your essay refers to speech and speakers.  It’s entirely reasonable to accept one form in oral communication, where emphasis and other cues are adding their own kinds of grammatical inflection, and another in written prose where English’s minimal inflection is often needed for disambiguation.  I try to avoid the, as you put it, “snooty” forms in speaking, but I’ll use them in writing, including email, and especially in professional contexts.

It’s really hard to tell sometimes if the appearance of “whomever” (or whom) is due to “overcorrection” or whether those speakers are simply following a different rule than the one you cite. In the Kristoff quotation, for example, the rule (maybe just in formal situations) might be “use the accusative for a pronoun in a pre-nuclear position” (pre-nuclear being here the position before the subject). This rule would predict “whomever it winds up being,” since “whomever” appears before the subject “it” but not “?whomever ends up being President” (the OP’s example), since “whomever” is in the subject position. It also predicts DW’s example above (“Whom do men say that I am?”).  ”I’m inclined to say that “whomever ends up being President” is due to hypercorrection, but not “whomever it winds up being.” 

Case in coordinated constructions is also pretty complicated, but the same problem about whether we have examples of overcorrection or simply different rules for coordinated vs. non-coordinated pronouns also apply. In each case, the rule that people cite as the “correct” one occurs in a different grammatical context than the one that they cite as being in need of correction. Maybe English (or some varieties of English) assigns different cases to pronouns depending upon whether the pronoun appears in the subject or pre-nuclear (i.e., before the subject) position, or whether the pronoun appears in a coordinated vs. non-coordinated construction, etc. 

(And for those language peevers out there. Yes, I know what your seventh grade grammar teacher told you. I just think your seventh grade grammar teacher was wrong, or greatly simplified English grammar for you).

Another overcorrection, common among athletes turned broadcasters (and especially NASCAR announcers, for some reason) is the use of “he” instead of “him” as a direct object: “Fines were levied against he and Kyle Busch.”  Grammar usage in spoken language usually reflects the oral language context of the speaker (my wife “doesn’ts” around me and my university colleagues and “don’ts” around her relatives).  I suspect that many of the athlete broadcasters have been corrected for using “him” as a subject (“Him and Tony Stewart got into a fight”) and have somehow internalized this correction as applying to all uses of “him,” probably operating on the principle that if something sounds wrong to them it’s probably correct–and if it sounds right it’s probably wrong.

Churchill was, I think, right.  Isn’t there a disjunctive pronoun in English, which allows us at the door, say, to answer “Who is it?” with “Just me”?  Surely “Just I” borders on the impossible.  Avoiding that “me” may also account for the incorrect “I” when combined with another pronoun.  Very much like the French “C’est moi!”

As others have pointed out, there can be distinction between spoken and written English. On the other hand, #2 and #5 ARE correct grammatically, whether they sound ”snooty” to the author or not. By her standards, it would seem that I have a tendency toward snootiness.  

I fear the French have it wrong.  The construction ‘moi aussi’ is similarly flawed, but may be the root of our “me, too,” or it is just human grammatical penchant to disregard accuracy in case.

Just a note that while you are correct about “whoever” being correct in the original sentence, the verb is “ends up”, not “being”. “Being” is a participle. “Ends up” is also acting as a linking verb (takes a complement in the nominative case) so your analysis with regard to “whomever” is correct, but on the wrong verb.

I wouldn’t agree with you on this. Think of the relationship between “whoever it is” and “whoever it turns out to be” (I’m modifying the example a bit, but the structure is comparable). There’s a clause enbedded within another clause, and whoever belings to the embedded clause, not the matrix clause (cf. “whoever it is” vs. *”whoever it winds up,” the * marking it as ungrammatical, in the sense we are discussing: transitive sense is fine) i would say that the structure is whoever it winds up [being __], with the __ linked to “whoever” that appears in prenuclear position (that is, before the subject of the matrix clause. It’s called an “unbounded dependency”

The ghost of W. Nelson Francis has been knocking, knocking on my chamber door.  He’s saying:

“A curious paradox exists in regard to grammar.  On the one  hand it is felt to be the dullest and driest of academic subjects, fit only for those in whose veins the red blood of life has long since turned to ink.  On the other, it is a subject upon which people who would scorn to be professional grammarians hold very dogmatic opinions, which they will defend with considerable emotion.  Much of the prejudice stems from the usual sources of prejudice–ignorance and confusion.  Even highly educated people seldom have a clear idea of what grammarians do…………”

…and even seldomer of what linguists do.

Your implied conjecture that nominees are whiches rather than whos bears some refudiation or consternation or something.

A word to you who derive an ego boost from ruffling your grammatical plumage in the face of the less worthy, n2n_0131 is setting up a snipe trap.

What you felt was a parade of the ghosts of dialect scholars from mid-20th century walking across your grave site.  When  grammarians became linguists after 1959, the traditional-prescriptivists joined the undead walkers.  Dennis E. Baron used to shoo them off the Chronicle’s doorstep, but now we have Lingua Franca instead.

We need a better term than ‘hypercorrection’; for ludicrous errors ironically caused by an attempt to write or speak properly.  Is there such a term?  ’Overcorrection’ is better, but still lacking in my view.

‘Hypercorrect’ to my mind would better fit stilted uses like ‘this is she’.

to …159x,
      1st, no offense was taken, and I’m sorry if my comment sounded like I might have been offended — I wasn’t and ain’t. No apology needed.
 
      2nd, thanks for the explanation.  I see I stirred more than I realized at the time.

     I’ll take this opportunity to join you in at least a partial overlap of disappointment with this Blog Series, Lingua Franca.   It has indeed largely turned into a pet peevery with a lot of the commentors and even occasionally a few of the original posters asserting very strong opinions about things they don’t know much, if anything, about, who seem not to understand the notion of empirical evidence as applied to the study of how a language works, and some of whom seem sometimes either amazingly ignoramosious and stupid or else deliberately obtuse. .

replying to jffoster, “I’ll take this opportunity …”
I agree with you completely. In fact, I have found the comments of a few individuals, such as yourself, to be much more interesting and useful than many of the blog postings.

Not a single term.  The paradigm is not “correct,” “incorrect,” or “hypercorrect.”  The REASONS people run afoul of their own language are many and varied.  There are dialect differences, of course, double speak (when pomposity is used to deceive or conceal), formal vs informal, sometimes characterized as speech vs writing.  Some of these latter are simply conventions of edited English (“the book should HAVE (not OF) cited its sources” and the placement of apostrophes.  There are socially significant usage items as well as early stages in the language acquisition process.  There are violations of semantic restriction (“violence  is a topic which is highly opinionated by society”), slips of the tongue (“you hissed all my mystery lectures”), and purely illogical statements–some of the most entertaining coming from reports of accidents as reported to insurance companies: “i thought my window was down, but found it was up when I put my hand through it” and “to avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front of me, i struck a pedestrian.”

Of course, I could talk less, walk less, wear less, and care less if I wanted to.  On the other hand, some people say I couldn’t talk less if I tried, that I couldn’t walk less without becoming completely immobile, couldn’t wear less without getting arrested, and couldn’t care less if I reached within myself for untapped reservoirs of ennui.  One of these alternative claims is commonly believed to be beyond the pale, but I can never remember which it is: “I could care less” or “I couldn’t care less.”  Both seem to me to be fairly ordinary sentences of English.

It’s nice to see 22089159x, jffoster, nordicexpat, and others struggling (perhaps quixotically) against the forces of peeving about the alleged decline of grammatical standards. One of the results of my own linguistic education was the understanding that the correct grammar for a language was defined by the way that native speakers constructed words, phrases, and sentences in the course of fluent use of the language. So the fluent speech of Igbo by native speakers of Igbo yields the data that a linguist can use to try to make the correct, underlying grammar of Igbo explicit.

But I guess I drank too much of the Kool-Aid. 3rdtyrant informs us that all native speakers of French (and even the Academy) are speaking French wrong by using the prepositional object form of pronouns in any coordinate noun phrase, regardless of syntactic function. If a high-prestige language like French is subject to the same prescriptivist poppycock (thanks, Geoff Pullum) that comes from forcing one language into another’s Procrustean bed, what hope is there for those of us that want to help people overcome their classist and racist notions that are embodied in the designation of a certain variety of white, upper-class English as having “the” “correct” grammar for the language as a whole?

 Madonna, it seems, is the latest to climb on the ‘hypercorrection’ bandwagon. In her acceptance speech at the Golden Globe awards, speaking with her faux British accent, the pop songstress corrected herself at one point after paying homage to a particular person “who I adore” then quickly said “whom I adore.”