Have you noticed every other message board is populated by idiots?

It’s simply marked as being in the objective, not subjective, case. It doesn’t provide any more, or less, information than saying “him” instead of “he.”

I could very well say “I love he,” and maybe sometime we will. (After all, we don’t have a special objective form of “you,” nor do we casemark non-pronouns, as some languages do.) But we say “I love him,” with the “him” marked for the objective not only by its position and the context, but also by a case marker. Same goes for “whom.” Yes, we get along pretty well using “who” in many of the contexts in which we used to widely use “whom.” But that doesn’t make “whom” any more redundant than other objective case-marked pronouns.

Slashdot isn’t too bad either as long as you read at about +3.

We got our first computers at work a long time ago. There was no online access at the time. When we upgraded some years later, my boss got us an account online. I never felt the need to use it…I figured I was on the computer all day at work and why would I want to go home and be on the computer some MORE? My boss apparently felt differently, since one day he showed up at my house with a “surprise”…a computer. I was not all that pleased. I mean, it was nice of him and all, but the last thing I needed was a computer at home. I thought. So then, this friend of mine suggested that since I now had a computer at home, I should at least use email to communicate with him. I reluctantly agreed that it would be convenient to be able to “talk” to him by email at any hour and I started doing so. He told me that people didn’t bother with caps, it just took extra time and so on and so forth. Now, this drove me nuts, since I have always been kind of a grammar nazi myself…but I didn’t want to appear pretentious, so I forced myself to stop using caps. It was truly a struggle, believe me. And I know now that it was stupid of me to just go along with what I thought was the program. Still, I did.

When I stumbled upon the SDMB, I made my first post with no caps as I had been “taught.” Stumbling onto the SDMB was, BTW, my first REAL step into the world of the internet. Before that? I used email and I’d occasionally search for something. Not very often. Who knew that there was this kind of online community? Not me.

I learned right quick that this wasn’t the way to go, and frankly? It was a relief to go back to doing things the way I thought was correct. No one corrected me, or was mean…it was just obvious from reading the other poster’s posts that correct punctuation was the norm.

Then one day, a year or so down the line, I had occasion to look up that first post for some reason. It made me cringe. It STILL makes me cringe when I think about it. How embarrassing.

Oh, and Una runs the UnaBoard. A very excellent board with a lot of very intelligent people [sub]I don’t consider myself to be one of them[/sub] who use grammar and punctuation correctly for the most part. It is kind of like the SDMB, except that civility is a required element. There is no BBQ Pit, and people have to work out their differences by PM…if you try to fight on the board itself, beyond civility? the moderators will step in. Not with a heavy hand, but…they’ll step in. [sub]I’m a moderator there, so it is true that I’m prejudiced[/sub]

Here is the link.

UnaBoard - Powered by vBulletin?

matt_mcl: We don’t say things like “Me am hungry.” or “I love he.” because we don’t want to sound like ignorant cave men. That is the role “him” plays in the language: I called it a “class marker” above somewhat lazily, but it’s really marking that we have attained competence in the language.

“Whom” no longer fills that role. People with a full competence in the language (such as published authors, journalists, and trained public speakers) have totally abandoned it even in careful, prepared speech. It is recognized as a valid word in the language by most educated speakers, but none of them feel any compulsion to use it even in their formal utterances. In short, it no longer has a role to fill.

No, I’m pretty sure we don’t say “I love he” because that’s not a possible utterance, as personal pronouns in English (at least in the range of English lects most of us here happen to speak) are case-marked. It’s not like we’re dying to say “I love he” or might naturally pop it out from time to time, but restrain ourselves for fear of the social consequences.

You’re right to say that “whom” has been superseded by the generalized use of “who”*, and therefore “Who do you love?” is now an acceptable utterance while “I love he” is not. However, the phenomenon of whom is structurally the same as the phenomenon of him - the objective form - and there’s no call to say that one is somehow inherently redundant and the other isn’t, just because the use of the subjective form is now in free variation with one and not with the other.

*Although I would argue that there is strong pressure to continue to use “whom” should one choose to front prepositions – many people for whom Who did you give it to? is a perfectly acceptable utterance would not say *To who did you give it? but rather To whom did you give it?, should they choose to use that structure. Or, for that matter, for whom this expression is an acceptable utterance..

I should point out that there are indeed registers where “whom” is still standard usage: the more formal end of the written spectrum - say, formal business documents, legal documents, theses and other academic works, etc. - more formal than newspaper or magazine articles but not as formal as letters patent.

I was actually recently banned from a message board populated mostly by the intellectually challenged, at least in one of the fora.

I found the correctly spelled and punctuated posts with some grasp of grammar to be more depressing than the others. Because it tended to disprove one of my basic assumptions, that clear thinking produces clear writing (and vice versa). It was unpleasant to see things that looked as if they were produced by rational persons, but when actually read showed that the poster was almost aggressively stupid.

Regards,
Shodan

I lurk at a number of parenting message boards. Generally the grammar isn’t quite so bad but once an argument gets going the stupidity often piles up quite high.

You haven’t witnessed idiocy until you’ve read some moron insisting that vaccines are evil (and when called on it resorting to cites filled with articles alleging Princess Diana married a lizard king) or a bunch of idiots cheering on a woman determined to have an unassisted home birth even though she’s having premature triplets. The boards at Mothering Magazine are the world class headquarters of that sort of open parent related insanity.

I have been tempted to invite the fools here solely to see them get buried in reality.

Absolute write is another outpost of sanity. AW is wonderful. Unless you are clearly very young poor writing and reasoning is simply not tolerated. Plus the site offers the additional wonderful bonus of having many, many published writers who will generously share all they have learned.

That’s because all of the morons are over at TalkCoelacanth

I frequent a couple of film industry message boards. One just recently started using Moderators. The boards tend to be rather nicely self-policing because if you have even a modicum of respect for the other posters, the “don’t be a jerk” rule is always in force, even if it’s not in a stated list of Rules of the Board.

And my first thought was that the board was about fishing. Go figure.

Jim, my dear, you should have used a semicolon rather than a comma. A semicolon is used when each part of a sentence could stand alone as a sentence, but you wish to indicate that the two are closely related, such as cause and effect.

You asked for it!

Agreed! I was lurking on one Board where a woman who had been placed on bedrest was planning to drive here and there and pick her friend up at the airport and all that. She had lost her last child at 20 weeks. And all the women were sending her “get well vibes” and “babydust” or some other crap, and no one was saying, “Are you fucking insane?!”

Also, a lot of the members on those boards have signatures with pictures and tickers showing everything from how far along they are in their pregnancy to how long it’s been since they last gave a blow job, or some such foolishness. It makes the threads themselves impossible to load. I don’t even lurk anymore for those reasons.

I am a member of three specialized message boards in addition to this one.

For the most part, those boards do not suffer much in terms of semi-literates at the keyboards, but all three have issues with large parts of their membership saying stupid things (on-topic, if it matters any), often in ways that suggest a lack of understanding as to how the real world operates.