Who/Whom
It’s always fun to watch smaller newspapers and online journals get
all worked up about the New York Times — they sneer at the snobbisms,
gloat at any typos or errors, and laugh when ‘trend’ pieces are
published long after the trend has dissolved.
So it was especially satisfying to pick up the Brooklyn Eagle and find
an article by Henrik Krogius bemoaning the frequent misuse of
who and whom by prominent writers, including the Times’
Gail Collins.
Krogius writes:
Commenting on the recent death of Leona Helmsley, New York Times
columnist Gail Collins referred to Harry Helmsley, “who she wed…”
Ms. Collins may have been signaling that she was too cool to obey
grammatical strictures, unless she simply didn’t know the difference.
And her copy editor, who likely knew the difference, may have felt
constrained about messing with the sacrosant copy of an op-ed page
regular. It may also be that “whom” has become altogether too
difficult a concept for a world in which the subject, predicate and
object are totally alien notions.
Take that! He goes on to tear apart novelist Emily Mitchell (The
Last Summer of the World), who apparently likes to sound smart by
saying “whom” when she should say “who.” All in all, a snarky piece,
but it’s somewhat redeemed by the fact that it reminds us of the
who/whom rule in fairly simple terms:
Failing to understand that “who” is the subject of a clause while
“whom” is the object of a verb or preposition, too many writers get
thrown off by modifiers places between this pronoun and the verb. The
modifiers don’t alter the basic grammatical structure.
