Dear people-who-run-Twitter, whom to follow, whom | Hacker News Reader

Dear people-who-run-Twitter, whom to follow, whom

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75 pointsralph44 comments

As a linguist, I can say resolutely that your prescriptivism is basically pounding your fists against the immovable brick wall of change. All types of case are rapidly disappearing from English. It's a continuing trend and has been for hundreds of years. The ambiguity generated is a trade-off people make for a variety of conveniences, let alone to fit in.

The subjunctive mood is basically gone from practiced speech, too. None of it is terribly worth lamenting.

In fact, changing it to "whom" would do nothing more than alienate its large-scale market, who aren't all leather elbow pads and Strunk & White, but rather real people who exercise language outside of the confines of a book report.

Sorry, dude. It's just not worth getting bent out of shape about.

There's a joke in there about language being dynamic and you referring to @VictoriaCohen (clearly female) as a 'dude'.

"Dude" has been unisex for a while now. It would be almost offensive (not to mention dated) to call someone a "dudette".

The immovable brick wall of change? That doesn't sound right...

I think that's the point. Good writing often doesn't make sense on a literal level. Apart from this, my favorite example from recently: "and with Kevin Garnett and the newly-signed Jermaine O’Neal, Danny Ainge has just successfully assembled the greatest collection of big men in the history of 2002." http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2010/08/luke-harangody-boston-...

Without Shaq's name in there, I had to read the article in order to understand the humor of the quote: the Celtics now have Shaq and Jermaine O'Neal and Kevin Garnett all on one team; in 2002 (when they were near their collective prime), that collection of big men would have been unstoppable.

Yay! Thank you for saying that. All the armchair grammarians in Twitter-land tut-tutting over this has been bugging me but I couldn't put it as eloquently as you have. Nice job.

I suppose we could look at this from an external perspective and actually see some good: Deprecating the subjunctive makes English easier to learn for non-native speakers.

And harder to parse unambiguously for everyone. Gee, thanks.

Let alone in which to fit. (j/k)

To come back with a predictable response: everyone says "who" even if they mean "whom". Using "whom", even if it is grammatically correct, is perceived to be wrong in most conversational situations, or other informal situations like Twitter.

Anyway, the quick guide: if you would say "him/her", use "whom", and if you would say "he/she", use "who".

"Who is that?" ... "He is the programmer."

"To whom is the message addressed?" ... "It is addressed to him."

He -> Who / Him -> Whom

But who wouldn't say "Who is it addressed to?" You'd sound like the posh bloke from an Ealing Comedy if you used "whom" all the time.

You might sound like Inspector Morse; he was repeatedly correcting Lewis. Here in England, "everyone" doesn't say "who" when they mean "whom".

What, that Ralph Corderoy, one-time of the PCG? You should be able to work out who I am from my username ;)

Anyway, I can't remember when I last heard someone use "whom" outside of slightly cheesy television series like Morse...

Almost certainly that one. Mr Burns, is that you? You've had me accessing bits that hadn't been scrubbed in a long time and have suffered some rot. Have you just arrived at number 63 or just left? There's a Dorset LUG if you're interested.

Morse can be cheesy, but I thought it was a cultural reference that Americans may know. :-)

Sent email, rather than doing our correspondence here :] Left Dorset last year, now in Hampshire again.

I've always used whom, but now I live in Canada I find myself missing it more often than I did in England. Perhaps it's just that I was taught when to use who and whom.

The vast majority do, except when the word is preceded by a preposition. E,g:

"Who is it addressed to?" versus "To whom is it addressed?"

William Safire said it best:

"The best rule for dealing with who vs. whom is this: Whenever whom is required, recast the sentence. This keeps a huge section of the hard disk of your mind available for baseball averages."

Put this in the "most people don't care" bin along with the subjunctive mood, which I see intelligent people failing to use more often than not.