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Why is this news? _Whom_ has been a rarity for decades. Questions like "Who did you give it to?" are far more common in normal speech than "To whom did you gi

• CrystalLangUser 9y ago
  "To whom did you give it", ignoring the "whom", sounds like something that might be generated by a robot trying to imitate the English language. That contortion of a sentence comes from the old Prescriptivist rule "never end a sentence with a preposition". Never mind that it leads to such odd sentences as that, and a loss of clarity.
  • frobozz 9y ago
    The "prepositions are not things for ending sentences with" point is a distraction. "Who did you hit?" and even "who hit who" have long been the norm in speech. The _whom_ version of those utterances would not often have passed the lips even of older, more educated English speakers in the last decade of the 20th century. Here we are, nearly 20 years into this century and news is being published about the demise of a word that had almost entirely fallen out of common usage last century.
• MartinCron 9y ago
  It is news in that The Economist recently used the more modern usage which caused a bit of a stir amongst their linguistically conservative readers. I noticed, but I wasn’t one of the many who wrote in to complain.
• aklemm 9y ago
  It's newsworthy to discuss the degree of change in common usage and especially the degree to which publications or usage recommendations are changing practices because of common usage.
  • frobozz 9y ago
    The decline of whom started a century and a half ago, and was barely used at the end of the last century. As a news item this is about as timely as the outbreak of the Iraq War.