Indexing Scholarly Materials

Sir, I understand and agree with your point. And shame on your heckler, too. May he be the bearer of 999 diseases and may everything that is bad and putrid in the universe befall him and his children’s children’s children for aeons to come. I’m a little concerned, however, at the ease with which you treat the ultimately arbitrary and fluid distinctions you draw as carved in stone. Why are you so quick to dismiss as “unnatural” the choice “Whom are you supposed to trust” ? To some of us such construction comes quite naturally. The label seems unnecessarily pejorative. I know many Brits and Americans of all generations who would quite readily go for the “whom” construction and seem perfectly normal when they say it. I think you should be a little more generous in this respect, otherwise you risk appearing as  nitpicking and parochial as your heckler. Oh, also, there’s a mistake in your post’s penultimate sentence. Not that it matters, of course, but it makes you sound like you have a blocked nose.

I agree with all your examples except “he’s better than me”.  As you obviously know, there is an implied “am” at the end of that sentence and no one would say “He’s better than me am”.  Yes, of course if we want we can accept that repeated and pervasive usage makes something correct, even if just “normally” or informally.  I simply prefer to think that, like spelling, there are correct usages and incorrect ones that should survive in an educated society.  Maybe that is my problem.

If you were to give a one word answer to “who’s there?” would you say “I” or “me?” i think most people would say “me” even though the answer could be expanded to “I am.” (and if youvread Pullum and Huddleston’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (1113-1117), you can find a detailed discussion about whether “than I” is really a reduced clause.

Other than this distinction between formal and informal, which might be construed by some as adding another (unnecessary?) minefield to negotiate, does making the proper who/whom choice change the audience’s understanding of what’s been said or written? A misunderstanding based on one’s “misuse” seems highly unlikely to me. Is the who/whom difference not just a holdover from the time when English required inflectional endings to sort out how a word functioned in a sentence (a role now taken over by word order)? Now its primary function appears to be as gatekeeper allowing some to make distinctions about others that have nothing to do with meaning.

Fortunately (yes, “fortunately”), the fact that so many have trouble sorting out when to use which along with the fact that little-to-no meaning depends on the choice suggests to me that “whom” will someday be relegated to the history of the English language textbooks.

Could you perhaps indicate which parts of the post you don’t understand?  I think you’ll find some readers willing to try to help.

There’s almost always a significant difference between what people say and what they think they say, which is why linguists increasingly use corpora (a collection of texts in machine readable form) rather than intuition to support their claims. If you check the Corpus of Contemporary American English (a 425 million word corpus) you will only find 150 examples of “whom” appearing at the beginning of a sentence. If you limit your search to spoken English, the number drops down to 23. If you look at the British National Corpus (a 100 million word corpus), you will find only 20 examples of “whom” appearing at the beginning of a sentence. And, again, if you limit the search to spoken English, the number drops down to 3. While I am sure that there are many people who say that would readily use “whom” instead of “who” in a construction like “Whom are you supposed to trust?” the simple fact of the matter is that not many people do. 

I, too, suffer from the curse of knowing grammar and (almost) all its formalities and often odd-sounding rules and requirements. I have learned, however, to just let it go in regular conversation and writing, except when I hear things along the lines of “just between you and I,” or “she told it to you and he.”

I’m trying, but the nails-on-chalkboard effect still gets me every time.

So, the question always boils down to one’s comfort level: How much informal is too informal?  When does it seem awkward to enforce seldom-used rules?  And if there really is no rule against split infinitives, what is left from our grade-school education?  Does anything matter?

Actually, I would say, “It is I” or It is (insert name).  And so would my children–I once had to prove it to a skeptic.

What fun!!  Thanks for that. 

But why is ’Shakespere’ a mispelling?  Because ’Shakespeare’ is the common usage.  Likewise if ‘thru’ becomes more common than ‘through’ then ‘thru’ should be used tho ‘through’ was previously correct.  

The position I’m testing – I’m not convinced of it myself – is not that anything goes, but that common usage goes.

…sand6432,
      Note that in English subject~verb agreement is pretty sparse in most verbs, showing up only in the {-s} in the third person singular. So, while it does not seem to be vanishing from most dialects, I wouldn’t bet on its long run chances.  But many languages have no subject~verb agreement and get along fine without it.

How do you know that failure to preserve the less ~ few dichotomy is indicative of “laziness”?  Note that it is highly irregular.

Interesting. Thanks for that. I shall modify my way of thinking accordingly, although thinking of myself and everyone I know as abnormal oddballs will doubtless prove a most depressing personal project. ;)

You guys are crackin’ me up. Surely you meant to write “misspell”? Are you on the side of usage or rectitude?