In sentences such as “who(m) would you rather have dinner with, Joe or Bob”, some quick googling suggests that “whom” is, by the book, grammatically correct.
But I’m a quite literate native English speaker, one who is usually at least aware of those funny old cases (often inherited from Latin) where you should use an unintuitive tense or pronoun. I know the rule about “this is he”. I can at least make a stab at “if he were…” vs “if he was…” I try to use “less” and “fewer” correctly. I’m a stickler for “literally” meaning “literally”, and so forth.
And to me, “whom would you…” just sounds wrong. Period. It comes off as unnatural and pretentious.
What do dopers think? Is this one of those cases where common usage so overwhelmingly disagrees with the “rule” that it’s time to recognize that the language has changed? Or am I just wrong, and lots of people actually do say “whom would you”? Or am I misunderstanding or misrepresenting some part of the situation?
(Possibly relevant data point: a google search for “whom would you”, with the quotes, returns 279,000 hits. Without the M, it returns 43 million.)
I must confess that my grammar education was not robust enough to teach me the proper usage in the first place. I learned the difference between “he and I went to the store” vs “he and me went to the store”, but that was about it. So, I learned a bit by reading this.
The upshot is that, as with so much usage, rules bend over time and “whom” is on the way out.
Yup. The objective-case pronoun “whom” agrees with its grammatical function as the object of the preposition “with”.
We say “I would rather have dinner with him”, not “I would rather have dinner with he”.
So the objective-case “whom” in “Whom would you rather have dinner with?” is technically more grammatical than the subjective-case “who” in “Who would you rather have dinner with?”
However, language is constantly evolving, and English has evolved to accept “who” as a substitute for, or even in preference to, “whom” in almost all cases.
I think it’s already widely recognized that the language has changed: you don’t get that many editors correcting objective-case “who” to “whom” these days.
I still usually use “whom” instead of objective-case “who”, but then I have no particular objection to sounding unnatural and pretentious. It is also a fun way to annoy self-proclaimed linguistic descriptivists who (rightly) object to the rigid enforcement of artificial Latin-derived grammatical rules in English and (wrongly) carry that anti-prescriptivism to the point of becoming prescriptivists themselves, in the opposite direction.
I think it is primarily because English thrives on the mouth noises: when speaking, “who” is simply much easier to utter than “whom”. The spoken version of the language then overwhelm the chickenscratching part. It would be interesting to study how and unwritten language changes when compared to one that is both written and spoken: how does the written language affect development of the spoken language?
To my ear, “whom” in this context certainly sound more formal and less familiar than “who”… but I do a lot of my communication (both written and spoken) in formal register, so it doesn’t sound at all unnatural to me.
I wouldn’t fault anyone for using either “whom” or “who” in that context.
In favor of “whom”:
It’s grammatically correct, for reasons that aren’t really all that complicated or esoteric:
And it’s clearer and easier to parse, to those who understand how it works. The “whom” signals that there’s a verb or a preposition coming up that the “whom” is going to be the object of.
In favor of “who”:
“Whom” may well be on its way out, and may well sound pedantic. I remember reading many years ago in an official grammar book (maybe a school textbook) that, when in doubt, one should use “who”—that it’s far more acceptable to use “who” where “whom” would be technically correct than vice versa.
As opposed to noises from other parts of the body? All human languages are produced primarily with the mouth. (Even German.) Of all the world’s languages, English isn’t particularly special, (though of course, everyone thinks their language is different from all the others).
Are you thinking of programming languages? Which languages are commonly used for communication and not spoken? All natural human language is fundamentally spoken first–writing is the artificial part, the afterthought.
Humans are born with with the capacity to generate any language sound with their mouths, with equal ease. As a baby grows, it develops facility to produce the sounds of its native language(s), and then other sounds start to become “difficult” only because they are not part of those particular phonologies. English speakers are happy to continuing pronouncing many other sounds that arguably (from the position of a non-native speaker) are much more difficult than whom. It only seems less easy to pronounce because we’re less accustomed to pronouncing it–in that syntactical position.
It’s more a question of register. You don’t feel comfortable wearing a suit at the beach, but it feels fine when you’re going to a job interview–though we don’t go to job interviews very often. That’s when we choose whom, (instead of who), in questions (and adjective clauses) with “abandoned prepositions” such as the with in the OP.
But I just posted in wonky’s IMHO thread that I think it’s time to ditch “whom” altogether. As I said there, I am hearing well respected journalist on NPR use “who” instead of “whom” all the time. It’s only jarring because they are respected journalists, and I’m surprised they aren’t using a simple grammatical construct correctly. And I’m not talking about tricky situation where it’s hard to figure out, on the fly, which form to use. So, let’s end the whom controversy once and for all. It’s dying a natural death anyway.
This is still mostly true, but not quite completely. As an example, what’s the pronunciation of the word “pwn”? It’s ambiguous, because the word originated in a purely textual context, not a spoken one.
There are also curious cases like the Chinese language(s), where it’s not uncommon for two people to be able to communicate in writing, but not in speech.
I agree with John Mace re: *with whom. * If you’re gonna do it, do it all the way right. WAG that it sounds “pretentious” because it’s less commonly used in contemporary US English, and those more likely to use it are probably more educated and in more professional or elite roles.
What’s “not all the way right” about “Whom would you rather have dinner with?”? I expect that you’re going to point out that it ends with a preposition, but there’s no rule against that, and never has been.
Who overtook whom is popular language 100 years ago. The language changed before a single one of the people who insist on the rule were born.
The only reason you still hear arguments about it is that the people I like to call the illiterate pedants spent their careers railing against what they saw as the decline of good English. This started back in Victorian times. Gosh, can you imagine how wonderfully pure and perfect English must have been before that decline? It wasn’t, of course. It was changing constantly every single moment of its existence.
Who vs. whom was a particular bugbear of theirs, though at least it had more provenance than "no sentence may end with a preposition. And the prohibition against sentences beginning with “and.”
Fortunately, actual linguists love to tear these pedants new ones. Noah frikking Webster thought that who was acceptable and that insisting upon whom was false correctness. Good English is the English written by good writers. Good writers are professional working writers, the ones you see every day in books and magazines. They’ve gone over to who generations ago.
You will still see “whom” at times. I use it myself on occasion when I feel the sentence wants the heft and precision. But that is a conscious choice concerning usage, which is exactly what good writers use in place of ancient “rules.” If you wanted to toss whom into the trash, feel free. You can sleep peacefully knowing that anyone who would object is someone not worth listening to.
(Personally, I would ignore any advice by Webster on grammar reform, spelling reform, politics, and religion.)
‘Whom’ versus ‘who’ is not unnatural, unintuitive, nor an artificial attempt to impose a Latin case system on English. Do you confuse ‘wer’ and ‘wem’ in German (assuming you speak German)?
If the style guide says it is OK to substitute one for the other, fine, but it is no less a distinction than he/him or who/whose.
The real problem here is not who/whom, it’s ending the sentence with a hanging preposition.
Rewrite it as “With ____ would you rather have dinner, Joe or Bob?”
Many native English speakers (even Americans!) find “with whom” actually sounds better than “with who,” even if it’s stuffier.
Even better, follow** Burpo’s** suggestion. The sentence still ends with a hanging preposition, but now it’s implying a pronoun, which will be whatever the reader/listener thinks it should be.