3 ms·

As an American, I assume without evidence that it's way more common in British English, because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out

by kibwen 3y ago

As an American, I assume without evidence that it's way more common in British English, because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom".

zarzavat 3y ago
Wait… do Americans not say whom?
- GrantMoyer 3y ago
  The Americans who know when to use whom and who and Americans who think they know when to use whom and who are those who use whom, while Americans whom the distiction between who and whom thouroughly confuses and Americans to whom whom is entirely unknown are those by whom who is solely used.
  - topaz0 3y ago
    Oh it's a bit more complicated than that. There are also those who don't use whom because they know it's a relic of a case system that has been gradually fading for a thousand years. Not to mention those whom use it incorrectly on purpose to annoy the pedants.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    Kudos for writing the entire sentence without making a mistake (yes, I checked). Although perhaps the use of 'whilst' would complete the intended stylistic flare?
- impendia 3y ago
  Not much. Americans use "whom" some, especially in formal writing and/or speech, but colloquially "who" is much more common. For example, as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me It would be fair to call this ungrammatical in American English. But whom does survive in fronted prepositional phrases ("the person for whom this item was obtained..."). It's dead in prepositional phrases that haven't been fronted just like it's dead everywhere else. Something vaguely similar happened in Spanish, where there is a special pronoun case that can only be used with the preposition con ("with"). There, the special case descends from, interestingly enough, the same preposition, Latin cum, instead of from the Latin case system. But the phenomenon ends up being the same.
    - lupire 3y ago
      "Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-partying-into-the-night-at-sondheim-s.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-party...
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > "Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though. Try polling some people on that.
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        It's certainly a surprising enough construct that it sounds incorrect, which is the metric that matters most to most people.
- da_chicken 3y ago
  We do, but "who" is acceptable in both tenses. There's no reason to ever use "whom" because it's the only one you can use wrong. "To whom did you give the book?" is more often "Who'd you give the book to?" complete with the similarly forbidden preposition.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    Yet, among those with whom I associate, "Who didja..." is more common than the semantically equivalent elision "Who'd you", probably because it is ambiguous whether the latter is in the past or present tense. (For context, I live in south-west England, have an RP accent, and 'whom' was genuinely the word that felt most natural to me when writing this post.)
    - lupire 3y ago
      People speak of the future conditional so rarely, it doesn't affect linguistic evolution. "Whodja" being shorter and less stuttery than "whodidja" is a much more powerful driver. Like "Wensday", unless you actually need to disambiguate past from future.
082349872349872 3y ago
"Babe, we have guests, whom we use the fancy relative pronouns with." Don't make me delve any deeper into pedantry ("with whom we use...")
mikestew 3y ago
like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom" Semi-fancy? Man, that's a pretty low bar for fifty-cent words. I use it so I sound like I actually went to school and paid attention. If those with whom I speak find basic grammar fancy, that's on them.
- kibwen 3y ago
  What makes the latter sentence sound highfalutin is that you've been required to contort it away from idiomatic American English sentence structure in order to force in a "whom". The usual way of phrasing the sentence avoids "who" entirely: "If the people I speak with" or "If the people I'm talking to".
  - lupire 3y ago
    Who(m) are you talking about? It's the "m", not the sentence structure. The awkward archaic structure is a different, often comorbid, affectation among Latinophiles.
cryptonector 3y ago
> because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom". Them's fightin' words. 'Whom' is super useful because it is grammatically necessary.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  Give me a sentence where it necessarily eliminates ambiguity and I will thoughtlessly replace it with something more colloquial and similarly unambiguous. It's possible you'll find an example I can't trivially fix, but I think they're rare enough to be more or less irrelevant.

by kibwen 3y ago

As an American, I assume without evidence that it's way more common in British English, because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom".

zarzavat 3y ago

Wait… do Americans not say whom?

GrantMoyer 3y ago
The Americans who know when to use whom and who and Americans who think they know when to use whom and who are those who use whom, while Americans whom the distiction between who and whom thouroughly confuses and Americans to whom whom is entirely unknown are those by whom who is solely used.
- topaz0 3y ago
  Oh it's a bit more complicated than that. There are also those who don't use whom because they know it's a relic of a case system that has been gradually fading for a thousand years. Not to mention those whom use it incorrectly on purpose to annoy the pedants.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Kudos for writing the entire sentence without making a mistake (yes, I checked). Although perhaps the use of 'whilst' would complete the intended stylistic flare?
impendia 3y ago
Not much. Americans use "whom" some, especially in formal writing and/or speech, but colloquially "who" is much more common. For example, as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me It would be fair to call this ungrammatical in American English. But whom does survive in fronted prepositional phrases ("the person for whom this item was obtained..."). It's dead in prepositional phrases that haven't been fronted just like it's dead everywhere else. Something vaguely similar happened in Spanish, where there is a special pronoun case that can only be used with the preposition con ("with"). There, the special case descends from, interestingly enough, the same preposition, Latin cum, instead of from the Latin case system. But the phenomenon ends up being the same.
  - lupire 3y ago
    "Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-partying-into-the-night-at-sondheim-s.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-party...
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > "Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though. Try polling some people on that.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      It's certainly a surprising enough construct that it sounds incorrect, which is the metric that matters most to most people.
da_chicken 3y ago
We do, but "who" is acceptable in both tenses. There's no reason to ever use "whom" because it's the only one you can use wrong. "To whom did you give the book?" is more often "Who'd you give the book to?" complete with the similarly forbidden preposition.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Yet, among those with whom I associate, "Who didja..." is more common than the semantically equivalent elision "Who'd you", probably because it is ambiguous whether the latter is in the past or present tense. (For context, I live in south-west England, have an RP accent, and 'whom' was genuinely the word that felt most natural to me when writing this post.)
  - lupire 3y ago
    People speak of the future conditional so rarely, it doesn't affect linguistic evolution. "Whodja" being shorter and less stuttery than "whodidja" is a much more powerful driver. Like "Wensday", unless you actually need to disambiguate past from future.

082349872349872 3y ago

"Babe, we have guests, whom we use the fancy relative pronouns with." Don't make me delve any deeper into pedantry ("with whom we use...")

mikestew 3y ago

like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom" Semi-fancy? Man, that's a pretty low bar for fifty-cent words. I use it so I sound like I actually went to school and paid attention. If those with whom I speak find basic grammar fancy, that's on them.

kibwen 3y ago
What makes the latter sentence sound highfalutin is that you've been required to contort it away from idiomatic American English sentence structure in order to force in a "whom". The usual way of phrasing the sentence avoids "who" entirely: "If the people I speak with" or "If the people I'm talking to".
- lupire 3y ago
  Who(m) are you talking about? It's the "m", not the sentence structure. The awkward archaic structure is a different, often comorbid, affectation among Latinophiles.

cryptonector 3y ago

> because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom". Them's fightin' words. 'Whom' is super useful because it is grammatically necessary.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
Give me a sentence where it necessarily eliminates ambiguity and I will thoughtlessly replace it with something more colloquial and similarly unambiguous. It's possible you'll find an example I can't trivially fix, but I think they're rare enough to be more or less irrelevant.