WHO AND WHOM

‘The best rule for dealing with “who” versus “whom” is this: whenever “whom” is required, recast the sentence. This keeps a huge section of the hard disk of your mind available for baseball averages.’ (Author and former presidential speechwriter William Safire).

“Whom” is a very difficult word for English-speaking people to use. It is also very unpopular and most people follow the advice of William Safire and ignore it.

The word “whom” should not be difficult to use but it seems to cause endless problems.

The rule about the use of “whom” is simple if we remember the subject of a verb and the object: “whom” is the object:

A

B

As ever, the subject of the verb is the person or thing who does the action (the actor). In these two cases A and B it’s the reply to the question, for example “Mary”. The object is the person or thing who does nothing; the receiver, victim etc.)

This should make the topic “whom” as simple as:

The experienced speaker would not make the mistake of saying something

very wrong like:

However, many English-speaking people never grasp the idea: they hate the word “whom” and hate having to use it.

I suggest, once again, that the problem has its roots in the social class system: in educated families “whom” is used casually and correctly, but when ordinary English-speaking children learn about “whom” in school it is as foreign to them as a principle of algebra – it is not part of the speech pattern of their family and friends and they quickly reject it and forget it.

As the young people grow up in a lower-class environment they learn that “whom” sounds pretentious and ‘posh’ (which it usually does) and they actively resist it.

So the best advice comes from Mr. Safire: if you feel tempted to write “whom” – and are not completely confident about it – re-write your sentence. In this way you will avoid errors and more people will like you.

The examples using “whom” at B above are correct but we would usually recast them using “who”:

Who did you like?

Who did you tell?

Who did you give that to?

These modern uses of “who” would horrify our educated ancestors but they are good modern English.

Typical embarrassing mistakes using “whom”:

Servant answering the telephone: “Whom shall I say is calling?”

Newspaper items:

“The Queen and Prince Philip, whom were welcomed today…”

“Charles Dickens, to whom* the library is dedicated and whom published many books….”

“Football is a team game; it doesn’t matter to me whom scores the goals.”

* This “whom” is correct, subject to these comments.