For whom, the bell tolls

I'm more annoyed by the use of "it's" in place of the possessive neutral pronoun.

But I guess the distinction between whom and who is not so obvious in a lot of cases (and I was surprised to realize it is really "Whom to follow").

German still have a lot more familiarity with cases, still "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod"

One of the CCC conferences had the motto “Who do you trust?”

They had a FAQ entry acknowledging that’s should technically be “whom”, but of 100+ complaints they got, all but one had come from Germans.

A common rule for determining whether “who” or “whom” is right is to substitute “she” for “who,” and “her” for “whom,” and see which sounds the better. Take the sentence, “He met a woman who they said was an actress.” Now if “who” is correct then “she” can be used in its place. Let us try it. “He met a woman she they said was an actress.” That instantly rings false. It can’t be right. Hence the proper usage is “whom.” -- Thurber /s

https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/26c3v4/was_...

On a more serious note, and not to claim right or wrong, I was taught in primary school that "whom" should be used as the object of a preposition "she, to whom I gave," or "she, with whom I studied," but never as a direct object; "who do you know?", not "whom do you know?". No idea if the latter is a geographical artifact or just what's taught nowdays. Speakers of slavic languages would recognise those first two usages as the dative (кому, komu, etc) and instrumental case (кем, kým, etc) respectively, and afaict in Old English the dative hwǣm was used for both. I suppose the direct object "whom do you know" came to popularity through more creative use somewhere along the line.

Great subheadline.

Total sidebar, but has any frequent reader of The Economist not been irked by the recent removal of the comment section? It remained one of the few places with a healthy signal-to-noise ratio and frequently the comments provided more insight than the articles they sat below (The Economist is wont to prescriptions as much as descriptions which helps to create debate).

Such a shame.

I would really like to see someone come up with a standard English, like the Academie Francaise or the Caighdeán have for their respective languages. I'm not a prescriptivist, but i think having a canonical standard people can choose to adhere to is always a good thing.

For what it's worth, in my experience "whom" is fine to use for indirect objects (a la dative) but not direct. But having these distinctions doesn't do a whole lot for clarity, as the move away from proper case distinction in modern German shows.

Articles like this help me realise why people in the UK so frequently misunderstand each other's meaning; the common usage language is a blunt instrument. It's disappointing to witness and I'm certainly guilty of mediocre articulation.

Makes sense. "Whom" is my go-to example of an English word that is on its way out.

This is news to whom, exactly?

That subtitle is too good not to use.

I shan’t be dissuaded and will continue using whom where appropriate.

Why is this news? _Whom_ has been a rarity for decades.

Questions like "Who did you give it to?" are far more common in normal speech than "To whom did you give it?", and have been since long before I was born.