8 ms·
Godot! Just what I've been waiting for!
by xacaxulu 13y ago
Godot! Just what I've been waiting for!
- sjwright 13y agoHaha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot (P.S. not what, but who.)
- pavlov 13y agoMore pedantically, shouldn't that be "just whom I've been waiting for"?
- einhverfr 13y agoEdward Sapir says no ;-) In fact he devoted significant space in his 1912 book "Language" to the death of "whom."
- StavrosK 13y agoPff, descriptivists.
- raverbashing 13y agoGerman maintains the difference (and a lot of other stuff), but yeah, as a substitute for the direct object it's pretty much dead. (Nobody says "Whom did that")
- einhverfr 13y agoGerman still has a dative case. We lost our dative case in England around the time Middle English developed.
- raverbashing 13y agoYeah, but Whom is used in the indirect object case, as in "To whom does this belong"
- einhverfr 13y agoIndirect object is similar to dative, sort of. Seriously, most people would say "Who does this belong to?" We can argue whether it is good style or not, but descriptively it is standard grammar.
- thesz 13y agoGoogling "to whom it may concern" returns ~2050000 results, "to who it may concern" returns four time as less results (~479000). You are not right.
- lutusp 13y ago> Googling "to whom it may concern" returns ~2050000 results, "to who it may concern" returns four time as less results (~479000). "Four times as less" -> "four times fewer" or "one-fourth" ??
- einhverfr 13y ago"To whom it may concern" is formulaic though, just like "Dear Mr. President." Those are words used as they are, verbatem, in a specific context. They are thus ossified and preserved in a much more conservative state than the rest of the language. It is not unreasonable to suppose that even as our language changes, that phrase will continue to remain intact in root and morphology even if the morphology disappears elsewhere.
- bmm6o 13y ago> Nobody says "Whom did that" Also, nobody suggests doing so would be correct. In "who did that", "who" is the subject of "did" and takes the nominative case.
- bjt 13y agoThank you! Your Sapir reference led me to Googling "sapir whom", which led me to http://www.bartleby.com/186/7.html http://www.bartleby.com/186/7.html. Paragraph 10 is where his "whom" discussion starts. Good reading.
- pavlov 13y agoOh well! My humble self standeth corrected. Anyway, we should not forget that Beckett wrote Godot in French, so the correct form is: "Godot! Exactement celui que j'attendais!"
- irremediable 13y agoIMO if you're going to be that pedantic, it doesn't sound right to end on a preposition.
- taylorwc 13y agoYou're right, a preposition is never a good thing to end on. It's one of those rules that people seem to never abide by...
- vram22 13y agoI just can't wait for Godot.