We were taught that, for the first person, 'shall' indicates the simple future while 'will' indicates determination: 'I will continue using "whom", regardless of what others may say.' For the second and third person, it's pretty much the other way round: 'will' indicates the simple future, while 'shall' indicates obligation. ('I won't tidy my room!' 'Oh yes you shall!')
This distinction is allegedly unique to England, possibly to the south of England: even there, I doubt it's adhered to much, except by sticklers. One of the older books on grammar (possibly Fowler's Modern Usage, I'd have to check) had the apocryphal story of the Scotsman who fell in the sea off the English coast, and in fear and desperation shouted 'I will drown, and no one shall save me!': onlookers left him to his fate, regretfully but in accordance with his apparently plainly stated wishes.
I see the title as "In the court of common usage, an old pronoun is losing its case". This is the correct possessive neutral pronoun. Has the title been changed? My wife is an English teacher (and strict grammarian) and it's pretty universal that her students have already learned its/it's, their/there/they're and your/you're by the time they reach 9th grade.
I would argue that use of it's and its is going the same way as who and whom. Its mostly obvious which one is intended and its not like you could tell the difference in spoken English anyway. While its nice to be correct I don't think its something worth getting annoyed about. (Yes, its deliberately wrong).
Those are two completely different situations, and it's intellectually lazy to consider them the same just because they're both words that people occasionally mix up.
First, who & whom are more rare in speech than its & it's which are fairly common.
Second, there is zero confusion about which one to use with its & it's. One is a contraction for "it is", and the other shows the possessive. These are very simple rules.
Who & whom, in my personal experience, don't get as much coverage in the English classroom. I'd be hard-pressed to find people who could tell me exactly when to use those versus its & its, as those come up less in day to day conversation.
Since its & it's have very clear rules and are used frequently, addressing the correct usage is important, same with your & you're and their, there, & they're.
I think “it’s” is confusing because adding apostrophe-s to a noun is normally how you make a noun possessive, so it can seem logical to do the same to the word ‘it’.
You don't add an “s” to other pronouns to make them possessive; “it” is unusual (unique, I believe) in that it both adds an “s” and does not take an apostrophe; nouns generally do both, pronouns generally do neither.
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.
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.
"To whom did you give it", ignoring the "whom", sounds like something that might be generated by a robot trying to imitate the English language.
That contortion of a sentence comes from the old Prescriptivist rule "never end a sentence with a preposition". Never mind that it leads to such odd sentences as that, and a loss of clarity.
The "prepositions are not things for ending sentences with" point is a distraction.
"Who did you hit?" and even "who hit who" have long been the norm in speech. The _whom_ version of those utterances would not often have passed the lips even of older, more educated English speakers in the last decade of the 20th century.
Here we are, nearly 20 years into this century and news is being published about the demise of a word that had almost entirely fallen out of common usage last century.
It's newsworthy to discuss the degree of change in common usage and especially the degree to which publications or usage recommendations are changing practices because of common usage.
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
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.
Huh? I must be missing something. While it is true that “He met a woman she they said was an actress” instantly rings false; had "her" been tried, it would also instantly ring false: “He met a woman her they said was an actress.”
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.
British isn't actually the closest to the root, American English is actually far more conservative then British English, for instance the dropping of Rs seen most places besides American English is actually an innovation.
A hypothetical "Académie anglais" would be about vocabulary and spelling, not pronunciation. Even the French aren't bothered by the existence of accents.
But the 1st is the direct object, the 2nd is the indirect object, so "Whom do you trust" would be the 1st case, "to whom" would (in the literal sense) be the 2nd, and "For whom the bell tolls" is "Wem die Stunde schlägt"
I'm not a stickler for "whom" and would probably get a lot of use cases technically incorrect, but "who do you trust" is one that definitely sounds wrong to me.
In many languages, including German and French, using the appropriate prounoun is obligatory. I only know how to use "whom" myself because I learnt French. About half the time I see English speakers try to use the word, it's wrong and should be "who", and using "whom" wrongly looks even worse than just sticking to "who" (which as argued, doesn't really look bad at all).
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).
Your experience was different then mine. I did not find the qualify of the comments better than other news sites. I also noticed quite a bit of spamming just before they removed the comments from articles.
56 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThou oughtest to!
This distinction is allegedly unique to England, possibly to the south of England: even there, I doubt it's adhered to much, except by sticklers. One of the older books on grammar (possibly Fowler's Modern Usage, I'd have to check) had the apocryphal story of the Scotsman who fell in the sea off the English coast, and in fear and desperation shouted 'I will drown, and no one shall save me!': onlookers left him to his fate, regretfully but in accordance with his apparently plainly stated wishes.
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"
I'm happy to know about your wife's students!
First, who & whom are more rare in speech than its & it's which are fairly common.
Second, there is zero confusion about which one to use with its & it's. One is a contraction for "it is", and the other shows the possessive. These are very simple rules.
Who & whom, in my personal experience, don't get as much coverage in the English classroom. I'd be hard-pressed to find people who could tell me exactly when to use those versus its & its, as those come up less in day to day conversation.
Since its & it's have very clear rules and are used frequently, addressing the correct usage is important, same with your & you're and their, there, & they're.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3703
I, too, will likely lament the loss, should it come to pass, but we've managed before, and we would again.
And actually, at its origins, Nouns didn't take apostrophes either.
This article explains some things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_genitive
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.
That contortion of a sentence comes from the old Prescriptivist rule "never end a sentence with a preposition". Never mind that it leads to such odd sentences as that, and a loss of clarity.
"Who did you hit?" and even "who hit who" have long been the norm in speech. The _whom_ version of those utterances would not often have passed the lips even of older, more educated English speakers in the last decade of the 20th century.
Here we are, nearly 20 years into this century and news is being published about the demise of a word that had almost entirely fallen out of common usage last century.
I noticed, but I wasn’t one of the many who wrote in to complain.
As a news item this is about as timely as the outbreak of the Iraq War.
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.
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.
I think that would be easier if you everyone agreed who'd set the default:
- the most (Indian English)
- the most powerful (the US) or
- the closest to the root (the British)
Could you elaborate on this? What problems does it actually solve?
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.
Wer: Who Wen/Wem: Whom
But the 1st is the direct object, the 2nd is the indirect object, so "Whom do you trust" would be the 1st case, "to whom" would (in the literal sense) be the 2nd, and "For whom the bell tolls" is "Wem die Stunde schlägt"
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.