Andy Fitzgerald, of North Conway, N.H., writes: “What are your thoughts on whom? Much as I’m a stickler for grammar, for some reason I’m finding the use of it in certain circumstances increasingly awkward.”
Andy, for years I’ve been telling people that William Safire, in his long-running New York Times column “On Language,” said that whom makes anyone who uses it sound like a butler — but as I discovered yesterday in a fit of fact-checking, if he did, he was quoting Calvin Trillin, the long-time New Yorker humorist and writer.
When the television show Who Do You Trust? launched in 1957 (thereby also launching the career of Johnny Carson, who was its first host), the status of whom in our language was already tenuous, as we can tell by the show’s name. Proper grammar, of course, would call for Whom Do You Trust? In whom, we have a direct object, analogous to him: Do you trust him?
It is possible to overcorrect for whom, as in “I was talking to the man whom everybody said was in charge of the project.” I see that mistake occasionally in my copy-editing work. What’s gone wrong there is that the writer is thinking “I was talking to him,” so they figure whom matches him and that’s all there is to it. But no. What’s modifying man is the entire clause everybody said he was in charge of the project — so whom should be who (who everybody said should …). If you find that confusing, please let me know and I’ll try to explain it more clearly.
My view is that it’s far better to undercorrect for whom. So when an author uses a who where grammar would prefer a whom, I don’t strike it out and “suggest” a change but merely comment in the margin to that effect and let the author decide.
Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.
Most of my High School Students guess that "whom" might be plural.