It's not required, but if you know what it means, using it allows you to be more eloquent. Shakespeare never put his sub-clauses in any rigid order, but never used commas either—and he got away with it because all these little hinting words in Early Modern allowed him to rearrange the sentence parts without losing any meaning.

It's sort of like type hinting :)

Calling parts of the language you don't happen to use "dead" is dead.

Also, in the real world, the expression "the real world" is a great way to win an argument without saying anything insightful.

This is crap. 'Thou' is part of a whole class of pronouns (2nd person informal) that are completely absent from all modern speech and writing. 'Whom' is the objective form of 'who'. I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them, who/whom. It's not used very often in speech, but it's used every day in formal writing and thus very much alive. There is no disagreement among educated speakers of the language as to which usage is correct and which is incorrect, only disagreement as to which is acceptable in context. Celebrating it's death is celebrating ignorance.

I guess your not wrong; that is how language evolves. However, I prefer precision. The worst offence is the incredible number of people who use "ignorant" as a moniker for "stupid", which is perhaps the most ironic of all mistakes.

It is ironic that you point that out. I would not have corrected him had he misused 'who' (i.e., if he had used it for the objective case) -- that would have been a little 'less wrong' than using the supposedly dated 'whom' for the subjective case, as others have said.

That said, I didn't want to be rude or impolite. To lessen the impact of the statement, as to make it 'just a side note!', I enclosed it in parentheses. But that seems to have done little good, since it has ensued another discussion of its own! Oh well, I hope someone out there maybe learned something interesting. :)

Cheers!

Speak for yourself. I care about such things.

Ignorance is not really bliss.