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 "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.