3 ms·
"whom" is wrong in 3 different ways in my opinion: (1) It should be "who", not "whom". I find that hypercorrection immensely annoying. (2) But actually, since
by microtherion 10y ago
"whom" is wrong in 3 different ways in my opinion:
(1) It should be "who", not "whom". I find that hypercorrection immensely annoying.
(2) But actually, since Lily is a company, it should be "which", not "who".
(3) But even "which despite raising […] has filed" is wrong. It actually should just be "Lily, despite raising […], has filed" or "Lily, which raised […], has filed". "which despite raising" subordinates "has filed […]", so the whole sentence turns into a noun phrase missing its verb phrase.
- theoh 10y agoI'll accept the who/whom complaint. As another poster has said, your point 2 is not a universally agreed rule. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.h... Your point 3 is totally valid, I assumed you were quoting a wannabe noun phrase. I wasn't paying enough attention.
- microtherion 10y agoPoint 2 to me was not about singular/plural, but about companies being animate/inanimate. It turns out that there used to be a very clear preference for "which", but by now, "who" is winning out in US usage: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=company+which%2Ccompany+who&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=5&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccompany%20which%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccompany%20who%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=company+which%...