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Huh. Really? I use whom all the time, and most of my friends do as well. Granted, a) we're all snobs, and b) we don't use it in every case we should, but we sti
by ianterrell 14y ago
Huh. Really? I use whom all the time, and most of my friends do as well. Granted, a) we're all snobs, and b) we don't use it in every case we should, but we still use it.
Maybe we're part of this little post 2000 resurgence:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whom&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=0&smoothing=3 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whom&year_s...
- bane 14y agoSo ask yourself the question, why not "thee", "thou" and "thy" (and relevant possessive forms)? I'm not saying "whom" is wrong only that it is archaic. Reviving just that word seems rather capricious and arbitrary no?
- adavies42 14y agothey have their place. i saw a lovely translation recently of a french request to "tutoyer" (address in the familiar) as "i must be thee to thou".
- einhverfr 14y ago"Whom" makes you sound a bit dated. Etymologists will get the joke. ;-) (I suppose I should explain it. "Whom" comes from a dative case, and would is not descended from a word that would be used for direct objects, but only for a subset of indirect objects and prepositional objects. However if elative uses relate to elated things, then surely dative uses in English relate to dated things, right?)