ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

I feel like wading back into the who/whom debate, but I'm rather busy, so I'll just post this, from the Guardian style guide:

Use of "whom" has all but disappeared from spoken English, and seems to be going the same way in most forms of written English too. If you are not sure, it is much better to use "who" when "whom" would traditionally have been required than to use "whom" incorrectly for "who", which will make you look not just wrong but wrong and pompous.

My argument is not that "whom" should never be used in any context, but that it is not "wrong" in any meaningful sense to use "who" instead. It's just a marker of formality and we should recognise it as such. "Could of", in contrast, is actually wrong, as CharlieNo4 says above.

And say that all prescriptivists are actually deluded descriptivists, since they make their pronouncements based on a version of the language as it is spoken/written. It's just that descriptivists actually spend vast amounts of time, money, computer analysis and so on to find out statistically what is actually said or written in a variety of contexts, whereas prescriptivists make it up. Laters ; )

It's "all mouth and trousers" i.e. all front - it's what's in yer trousers that counts. I think people started to conflate that phrase with things like "all bark and no bite" hence the corruption but it just turns it into a nonsense phrase IMO.

(oops the slowest typing ever made an x-poster outta me)

-- NickB, Wednesday, 27 June 2007 14:40 (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Depends whether you think of the "trousers" bit to connote embarassment or denote that the subject has no balls.

The monstrosity below illustrates why “whom” may come in handy on occasion:

A beaut: Game shows, the story said, are “popular only with older viewers, who advertisers are least interested in reaching.” Which is to say, least interested in reaching they.

http://cjrarchives.org/tools/lc/who.asp

No, it doesn't. It's only a "monstrosity" if you regard 'whom' as the only possible form of 'who' when it's the object of a verb, but (as this thread has gone into great detail) hardly anyone nowadays thinks you have to use 'who' instead of 'whom' in informal speech and lots of people consider both 'who' and 'whom' to be acceptable in writing, with the only difference being the level of formality that it signifies.

It would only "come in handy" if the sentence that you've quoted was either impossible to understand (which it isn't) or hideously inelegant (which is a matter of opinion, but to my eyes "...whom advertisers are..." looks far odder).

but to my eyes "...whom advertisers are..." looks far odder

whoa really? I think that this is one of the few cases in which the use of "who" actually offends my eyes/ears. Not so much because of its grammatical function, but because of how it sounds to have the "who" preceding a vowel without the "m" stepping in between, like an a/an situation. I know this is completely not how who/whom works, but "who advertisers are.." really hurt my brain unexpectedly, and I think that's the irrational reasoning behind it.

to who it may concern

I'm becoming more and more convinced that this is just a difference between British and American English. (xpost)

Nabisco - I think everyone agreed that after a preposition you would have to use 'whom', but that most of the time you can easily avoid that word order (one of the exceptions being fixed expressions like that).

oh well if there's a PREPOSITION then of course

Seriously, though, I doubt I've ever corrected anyone's who/whom in my life, but this kind of approach seems kinda incoherent -- you're basically saying the rule is bunk EXCEPT in cases where the rule happens to be obvious, which is like saying "stop lights are meaningless and archaic! unless there's a cop behind you, then stop."

Whereas of course the truth is that the words make a consistent distinction that most people just aren't very interested in, and we only bother to correct it in cases where it's so egregious that a substantial portion of readers would actually catch or be bothered by it.

aka pick-your-battles prescription

No, I'm not saying that. The whole argument has been against people saying it's wrong to use 'who' as a relative pronoun when it's the object of the verb. Some of us are on one side saying this is perfectly acceptable (and is perfectly normal for the vast majority in spoken English) and that the choice between 'who' or 'whom' is just one of register. Some are on the other side saying "Noooooo! It's the rule!"

I've never said it was impossible to use 'whom' in that position, just that it was a marker of formality, and in many cases would look excessively formal. Judging from the responses, this is not the case in American English, and its use is probably more widespread and less marked in the USA.

I've agreed that 'who' is not used after prepositions, but only from a descriptivist point of view. In other words it's 'wrong' because no one does it. At the same time I've said that in many situations you wouldn't put the preposition before the relative pronoun as this is also considered (perhaps only in Britain) as a marker of considerable formality (e.g. the vast majority of people would say or write "the school which I went to" instead of "the school to which I went"). So while the use of 'whom' is 'correct' after the preposition, this is only because the location of the preposition signifies formality in exactly the same way as the choice of the word 'whom'. The fixed expression "to whom it may concern" is only used in very formal writing and is used without variation (nobody says "to who it may concern"), so this is one rare occasion where you there is no alternative.

(ignore rogue 'you' in final sentence)

the vast majority of people would say or write "the school which I went to"

Or, preferably, "the school that I went to."

Yeah, fine, but that doesn't really answer what I'm saying, which is more of a meta issue here.

The who/whom thing isn't just a directive that you use one or the other in particular situations -- it's a general, consistent rule that one is an object and the other is, like, not.

When you say it's acceptable to not use "whom" in certain situations (based on people's usage), but it should be used after a preposition, you're just acknowledging that people only follow this rule when it's REALLY obvious (because the preposition is making it very clearly an object). So ... the general rule remains somewhat intact, but only in those instances where the average person might actually notice. No judgment is being made either way on the rule as a whole; we're just electing to not care about applying it except in the extreme.

So I used the term "pick-your-battles prescription" to denote that however descriptively you might want to frame this, the truth is that it's quite possible to acknowledge both that (a) there is an extant rule that "whom" is an object, and that (b) it is completely normal and acceptable to most people to ignore/break that rule in speech and all but fairly formal writing, enough so that it's not really worth fighting people over doing it correctly.

The main meta issue I'm having is acting as if there's a vast complex of individual who/whom rules applying to individual sentences, whereas there's actual one fairly simple overarching one. Your version of how we apply that irregularly is descriptively accurate. But it's just silly for you to say that "this 'rule' is wrong," as you did upthread, because you're not talking about the rule. You're just accepting that nobody applies the rule except in very obvious cases (and in those obvious cases the old, general rule stands just as much as it ever did).

(Anyway a rule can't be "wrong" -- it can be good or bad, useful or pointless, followed or not-followed, but not incorrect.)

...or that the rule described the language as it was once used, but is increasingly irrelevant today (but not completely irrelevant yet). So the use of 'whom' as the object form of 'who' has disappeared from everyday speech, but persisted in more conservative use. Even in more conservative use, i.e. written speech, it is slowly disappearing. It may be that in fifty years time nobody uses 'whom' except where it has become fossilized in fixed expressions (such as 'to whom it may concern') and that in a further fifty years it has disappeared even from them, or that those expressions are no longer used.
(xpost)

Dude, rules do not DESCRIBE, they are RULES!

And again, yes, precisely, that is what I am saying: you are just riding the wave of diminishing use, so you shouldn't pretend to have some kind of call on the RULE -- if you had an opinion on the rule either way, you would either ask for it to be used or consistently not-used, not just casually describe its current irregular status.

Actually I shouldn't even be referring to this as a rule-use issue: it's more a matter of having two distinct words for someone we've decided could be covered by just using one all the time.

Dude, rules do not DESCRIBE, they are RULES!

We're not really going to agree on this one, are we? ;-)

ARGH that statement has nothing to do with your descriptive jones, which I think is making you miss my point entirely -- hell, a good descriptivist should be the first to understand "rules" as meaning consistent strict guidelines, rather than likely observances. But whatever, nevermind.

how can you say "to who" is unacceptable? I have noticed increased acceptable usage of phrases like "to who" by such OTM people as nabisco

Hey wait possibly the sand in my vadge is just the idea of champions of endless description even using terms like "wrong," "rule," "acceptable," and "unacceptable!"

(Well that and not acknowleding that prescription is as much a part of natural human language development as anything else, down to the routine prescriptions of second grade -- cf the lack of similar stances and developments with regard to spelling, where there's a much more free-flowing level of interpersonal prescription and total respect for arbiters & authorities like, umm, the dictionary.)

If nabisco is not otm, who else should we turn to? It boggles.

WHOM YA GONNA CALL?

Aw crap. That was me, not JimD.

(Anyway a rule can't be "wrong" -- it can be good or bad, useful or pointless, followed or not-followed, but not incorrect.)

Nabisco otm. To place rules in slightly different frame of reference, a rule is always prescriptive, but never self-enforcing, and therefore is not necessarily descriptive of anything occuring in nature. It need only meet the internal necessity of being prescriptive to become a rule.

I may, for example, formulate a rule that white shoes may not be worn prior to Easter, or that when one spills salt a pinch of it must be thrown over one's left shoulder using one's right hand. These are legitimate rules. At one time they were both widely followed, now they are not. This says nothing about their inherent "ruleness". Rules they remain and forever shall be, even when they are forgotten by those who walk the earth.

Technically he could be using "rule" the way it's used in "as a rule" or "the exception that proves the rule" -- i.e., a descriptive kind of rule -- but obviously that'd be an interesting choice here, and like I say, it ignores the way prescription plays a massive role in even grass-roots, all-natural language. (The same way prescriptive rules about what you should wear play a huge part in what everyday people actually do wear.)

Wading back in to the debate ...

I prefer "patterns", not "rules", when it comes to grammar. It seems to make a whole lot more sense.

And something is "wrong" when it doesn't fit the pattern of the language as it is actually used, which of course varies according to context, register, channel, audience etc. As I said above, this is in essence what yer 19th Century grammarians were doing anyway, but rather than actually doing the research, which would anyway have been impossible without computer technology, they just used their insight and their own ideolect and got down to it. I find it surprising that people find this difficult. After all, that is pretty much how dictionaries have always worked. You do your research, collect your citations etc. They are now all written using corpus research. Why shouldn't we take the same approach to grammar?

So, we are saying that who/whom is a matter of pragmatics in addition to one of morphology, yougetme?

Also, in Jeb's link, the editor of the New York Times, no less, was campaigning for this distinction to be dropped. He ceased to be editor in 1950, so this was seen as archaic and pompous at least 57 years ago, probably more! Enough is enough.

http://www.amazon.com/Hardcover-Longman-Grammar-Written-English/dp/0582237254

This is great, by the way!

I think the preposition issue is interesting. You (Nabisco) are presenting the loss of a marked form for the object personal relative pronoun as one of sloppiness. We all know the rule, but we don't follow it, but we do for prepositions because it's more obvious.

That may actually be right, but I'd look at it another way. To me, regularity is what makes something part of the language at large, and not just a mistake/error/slip or whatever. And, here across a wide range of language we have a very regular pattern that we mark the pronoun after prepositions, but not when in object position. The frequency of it after a preposition is VERY high, and the frequency of it in object position is VERY low. You see, that looks more like *language change in action, folks* a new rule, than it does sloppiness.

I actually spent a couple of days getting my hands dirty researching this using the Cambridge International Corpus, which includes a lot of different corpora (corpuses? wonder what the frequency of those is ...) from different universities and other publishers and so on. It's one of the biggest, if not the biggest, and although there are problems with the weighting of different forms of language, it's pretty good.

it ignores the way prescription plays a massive role in even grass-roots, all-natural language. (The same way prescriptive rules about what you should wear play a huge part in what everyday people actually do wear.)

This is OTM. I think the fact that descriptivist and prescriptivist grammars are actually so similar shows you the enormous influence of the rules as taught (but also of how each individual does carry the whole language around with them, so their insights are going to be pretty good).

Descriptivist grammars, by starting from how the language is and then saying how it ought to be, rather than the other way round, are going to be a bit quicker to respond to language change, though. Which is what we're really talking about.

I mean descriptive and prescriptive grammars. Lose the "ist". (Idiot!)

Since 'definately' gets 16 million hits on Google, do you think dictionaries should list it as an alternative spelling?

Don't get me started on spelling! You'd be shocked.

But anyway, Google is not a corpus. It's all written and you can't weight for different kinds of writing etc.

Definitely gets 132,000,000 hits anyway, so I think we can make some, rough, assumptions about frequencies there.

Say that definately was used 90% of the time in a properly weighted sample, including prepared and sub-edited writing as well as spontaneous writing, then we'd have to think about it, wouldn't we?

That's where we are with whom.

Ha - me complaining about google being all writtenwhen we're discussing spelling = idiot!

Requiring 90 percent compliance is a bit steep, isn't it? After all, dictionaries have plenty of alternative spellings that are used far less than that (shewn, for example - it's in the dictionaries but when do you ever see it now?).

I guess my point is although it seems to make sense for grammar/spelling 'rules' to be descriptivist, I'm not sure they ever really are or can be. How exactly do you weigh usage, anyway? Surely that's inherently relative. Back in the old days dictionary citations were all from English literature. No doubt there's some other kind of bias that operates now. (I think it's highly likely that certain grammatical 'mistakes' might predominate in certain socio-economic or ethnic groups, without them ever finding their way into grammar handbooks as alternatives.)

That is an issue, but that is exactly what descriptive grammars such as the Longman one that I linked to above, attempt to do ie they look at different genres/registers/channels etc. and see how things work. Collecting spoken English is expensive - even for TV and radio you have to pay transcribers, and for conversational or business language you have to get volunteers to wear microphones for a few weeks or months and then transcribe that. I'm sure there are issues around who get to be the volunteers and thus the language that makes it in, and the spoken sample is always going to be smaller. The new genres of informal written English brought about by the internet should be both cheap to collect and fascinating.

Spelling works VERY differently: people develop all kinds of different speech patterns that get fairly ingrained, but there's almost total deference to the idea that there's a "right" way to spell things, even when people don't know what it is. (There's also a dictionary exercising authority on this point in nearly every home, whereas consulting a grammatical authority is rather harder.)

Jamie, I still feel like my point is somewhat getting missed, but maybe it's just not that great of a point. You say "regularity is what makes something part of the language at large," but you're talking about descriptive regularity. I'm not saying people should start using "whom" all the time -- I'm just pointing out that in relation to the Rule, our current usage is highly irregular. It's a pattern, yes, but it's not a coherent rule in the least.

I think I am missing something. How about this?

The way in which we break the Rule is so regular and so frequent that it invalidates the rule, or suggests a new one. How quick the gatekeepers of the language are to react to things like this is what we're arguing about.

Or, are you referring to the internal consistency of the grammar point?

Because on the face of it it seems a little irregular to have all your other relative pronouns not having a different object form, and the personal one having one. That said, it has a genitive form (whose) that nobody is knocking, and none of the others do. (In fact, I wish there was one for which. That would be really handy. whiches maybe?) That's the problem when you look at the internal logic. The language as desribed by the Rules is still full of quirks and inconsistencies.

Or am I still missing the point?

Argentine or Argentinian? I thought argentine was only for silvery things.

spelling = identification
grammar = communication

chew on that a bit.

[chews, isn't sure, swallows politely anyway]

Argentine or Argentinian? I thought argentine was only for silvery things

can't remember, but a good dictionary (ODWEs?) will help you out on the distinction i'm missing. i think you're right, but i might be wrong :)

My OD has neither! But I will search in others. It has no countries or country-related adjectives, in fact. And doesn't even have argentine as in silvery.

*throws 2-yr-old OD in bin*

argentine = silvery
Argentine = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)
Argentinian = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)
Argie (offensive) = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)

I don't know if there are distinctions such as those between Arab, Arabic and Arabian.

I've always used Argentine and Argentinian interchangeably. Based on the frequency of usage within our online database here, it appears we prefer "Argentine" to refer to someone or something from Argentina.

Argentine = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)
Argentinian = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)

hmm. i'm sure i've always perceived a difference between the two usages -- ie "Argentine" is the adjective and "Argentinian" the noun, or the other way round -- but that could be a house-style thing.

unlikely, given the state of the existing style book in our, er, "house". but hey. if i had a copy of ODWEs to hand, i'd check. but i don't. so i can't. so hey.

xpost

I like the adjective "Argentine" just on a gut level, mostly because I feel like we have a lazy English-speaking habit of always trying to force everything to fit the "_____ian" format. (To which we've recently added a lazy habit of always trying to force things to fit the "____i" format!)