Was there ever a time when (or is there a place where) “whom” is commonly used in spoken language? Or is it one of those “made-up” rules for proper grammar that was never commonly used?
I don’t know anyone who uses “whom” in everyday conversation and hearing it spoken is always jarring and adds an air of persnickety-ness. So I’m wondering where “whom” came from. Has it just fallen out of general usage or was it never really used much anyway?
Really? I hear “whom” quite a bit.
Granted I’m the kind of person who tested into an advanced high school (it’s int eh nations top 15 according to newsweek and we recently broke some world record for number of successes in History, English, and Comparative Politics) and uses albeit in casual conversation. I use my disclaimer not to brag, but to state that I’m far “removed” from typical people.
It’s possible people are using it and you’re just not picking up on it. I’m quite certain you’ve never really noticed when people are using the word “and” for example.
It’s much more noticable when used in the wrong way for effect(for some reason “whom” has this poetic feel to it).
But pay attention to your conversations, are you sure people aren’t using “whom”?
This one actually has legitimate roots, moribund as it is today. The OED describes it as “The objective case of WHO: no longer current in natural colloquial speech.” To the extent that it does get used today, the rules describing that usage are extraordinarily complex (see here, and for loads more discussion of “whom”, see here). But, yes, it was once a natural part of everyday speech.
I use “whom” in my daily conversations, and so do many people I know.
To use “who” where “whom” is correct seems to me to be about as jarring as saying “it’s them’s” as opposed to “it’s theirs” when being asked to whom an item belongs.
QtM, Midwesterner.
“Whom” is used correctly in my family. We’re from Long Island, not exactly a pocket of perfect grammar, but this might serve as a data point.
Actually, wait, that’s not wholly accurate. My mom was a stickler for English grammar (she was born/raised in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood by Russian-immigrant parents who used fractured English until they died, so I’m not really sure why or how she became such a perfectionist), and she pretty much drummed it into me as a child. The rest of my family – my sisters – are less likely to use “whom.”
Most people know to use “them,” “him” and “her” as the objects of sentences, so I’ve never quite understood why “whom” is so hard to parse. I know it’s a lost cause but I still hold the banner high for maintaining the usage of “whom.” Poor little nearly-extinct fella!
I suspect it has just fallen out of general usage. I think it’s also gained an air of pretentiousness and people prefer to say things like, “Who are you giving that book to?” rather than “You are giving that book to whom?”. Which is fine as long as you avoid the people with weird obsessions about prepositions and ending sentences.
Posting again to add a counterpoint to Jragon’s observation: Not sure if schooling has much to do with it. My “whom”-loving mom only had two years of college, and while my school system was excellent, my sisters went to the same school and “whom” didn’t stick with them. Mom and I both did/do crossword puzzles, so in generally we’re more word-people. FWIW.
The local spoken grammar in the New Orleans area is atrocious, but it’s very rare that I hear the ‘m’ dropped from whom when it’s supposed to be there.
OTOH, I can’t remember the last time I actually heard any need for it in a conversation. I notice when it is used incorrectly…spoken, or in print.
The grammatically correct question “To whom does this belong?” is usually phrased “Who does this belong to?” The latter is grammatically incorrect, but it seems to be acceptable in spoken English. (Turning the ‘who’ into a ‘whom’ doesn’t make it any more correct because you’re still ending the sentence with ‘to’.)
I have noticed that people who are trying to make themselves sound more intelligent than they really are will replace every ‘who’ with ‘whom’. If you’re poorly educated, this sounds pretentious and if you’re well-educated, it sounds idiotic.
I don’t doubt that many of you guys use “whom” regularly; however, what I would doubt is that you guys actually use it as a general-purpose objective case of “who”. For most modern speakers, the rules governing their use of “whom” are much more complicated than this (as discussed in my above links); for the most part, it is restricted to appearing after prepositions in relative clauses (interestingly, for some speakers, the nominative/objective distinction doesn’t really come into it, as long as these conditions are satisfied). Would you guys actually say things like “Whom were you just talking to?” or “I don’t know whom you’re talking about”? This would be very rare among modern users of “whom”.
I’m a word person too I read a lot, scored close to 800 on my SAT, always excelled at verbal stuff and both my parents are highly educated but I almost never hear “whom” in daily conversation and, if I want to use it, have to really think about it; it does not come naturally.
It does sound like other areas do use it more often but I also rarely hear it spoken on television or in movies. And when I do it hear it, it often serves as a way to establish a character as overly correct.
Huh, I just googled “whom usage” and found this interesting article.
The article is discussing the use of “whom” at the beginning of the sentence but it’s interesting that things have been changing for a long time.
What an incongruous thing to say. What is the notion of “grammatically correct” meant to capture, if not that which is acceptable in speech?
Nothing wrong with ending a sentence in a preposition; a ridiculous linguistic bugaboo that even most well-known prescriptivists don’t endorse.
If you think of it like he/him, then who/whom isn’t really all that odd. Would you say: I gave the book to he?
But I think the OP is onto something. Whom is on its way out, along with number agreement: Everyone seems to drop their whoms these days.
The objective case examples in Indistinguishable’s last post, and the use of “whom” in the subjective case, can be found in overcorrected prose from time to time, and I find them both really jarring. Much more so than forgetting to use “whom” where such use is actually warranted. I don’t even notice that.
It’s easy to consciously figure out what’s in the objective case and what’s in the nominative case, the way one might easily add a pair of two-digit numbers. However, such conscious processes aren’t (and have no need to be) the main engine of spoken language. Besides, a commitment to using “who” where the nominative case occurs and “whom” where the objective case occurs is at odds with the modern deployment of “whom”, as noted above. The easiest way to get the modern usage right is to first A) be a native English speaker and then B) just speak naturally.
Can we please dispense with the usual brouhaha over prescriptivist grammar? We will accept as a given that English went through a period of prescriptivism, and that it currently is trending toward a period of practicalism (a term I use to mean the grammar of everyday use, considering the integration into our communications of the instant message, the text message, combined with a diminishing reliance upon written English in general).
You well know that “grammatically correct” in a prescriptivist system is meant to capture the notion of how things should be, not how things are. :dubious:
Why is it objectively better for native speakers to flagellate themselves over whether or not they sound enough like Shakespeare? English has always been in a period of prescriptivism and it has always been in a period of practicalism. You can cry and cry about how English should be, but it’s not going to do any good for anyone other than your doctor, who might get rich from the resulting high blood pressure.
In addition to what Hostile Dialect says, I would imagine even a hard-core prescriptivist could agree with what I had said: “grammatically correct” is meant to correlate with “acceptable in speech”, whatever the latter means. If you are a descriptivist, interpret the latter descriptively; if you are a prescriptivist, interpret the latter prescriptively. If you feel people should avoid the letter ‘K’ or speak in rhymes, then interpret the latter accordingly.
Sure we can, just as soon as we dispense with the usual brouhaha about Creationism or any other topic where misinformed people spread opinions that contradict easily made observations. In other words, do you want to fight ignorance or ignore it?
When “how things should be” have nothing to do with “how people speak”, then there’s a serious problem. This problem is further compounded by classist and racist attitudes. I have no idea about the state of mind of jasonh300, but if he can believe that any group of speakers consistently speaks ungrammatically, then he’s imposing on them standards which deliberately exclude them.
These New Orleans speakers, whoever he’s referring to, obviously have a different dialect. Sure, they make errors when they talk (just like everybody), but they developed their speech patterns based on their community language standards, and to arbitrarily declare that their speech patterns are wrong is not only preposterous, it’s also degrading.
If we want more speakers to acquire fluency with Standard American English, which I absolutely do, the solution is not to strut pretentiously up to them and say that their perfectly fine language is wrong. We should instead acknowledge the correctness of every dialect given the proper context, whether we’re speaking of hillbillies or inner-city blacks, and then we should attempt to emphasize the advantages of learning a more standard dialect, which is more comprehensible not only elsewhere in the country, but also worldwide. And in fact, many many Americans are perfectly comfortable shifting into a more standard accent when the situation warrants, perhaps even including some of the people that jasonh300 overheard.
But in a sense, this is all off-topic. Indistinguishable answered the question, and this is noodling. If it’s your goal is to determine how people should speak, that they should give up their native dialects entirely and speak only rich white man’s English, then I encourage you to go to Great Debates and make that argument. It should be fascinating. But the discussion here is easy: we can simply and confidently state that jasonh300 is flat wrong when he says they use atrocious grammar. They don’t. That’s no more a brouhaha than any other factual correction in any other field.
Was that on purpose? 
I find myself (here in Michigan) trying not to use it when I “naturally” would, so as not to stand out amongst the crowd. It sounds stodgy in general speech.