This Grammatical Grouse Is Making Me Whomsick, says Griselda Heppel
On holiday recently, I ended up reading the newspaper more than usual. (Books too, which was far more pleasant an activity.) This was all down to a bad back, which had the twofold effect of stopping me from swimming and increasing my general grumpiness.I share this (as they say) by way of an apology for what follows… though I’m not really sorry.
You, on the other hand, may be, if you stay to the end of a grammatical grouse that has been brooding in my breast for years.
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| ‘An arrant pedantry up with which I will not put’ Sir Winston Churchill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill |
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| The soothing murmur of the Anglican Church (Southwark Cathedral, London). |
Look, I’m as much a fan of ‘whom’ as the next person. Anyone brought up going to an Anglican church will have the soothing murmur of ‘by whom and with whom and in whom,’ echoing in their soul, whether or not they continue in that faith. ‘To whom’ , ‘from whom’ and ‘at whom’ are good, too. See, I told you prepositions were involved. ‘By who’ and ‘with who’ jar so horribly we all know not to use them.
Sadly it shows the opposite. Yes, it is still correct, if archaic, when referring to the object of a verb eg ‘Whom would you like to see?’ Or ‘This is the woman whom I love’. But who talks like that nowadays?
The one area in which ‘whom’ has never been correct is when it’s the subject of a clause, eg in the parenthesis just above. If I’d written ‘among writers whom should know better’, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb, wouldn’t it? Please say yes.
Now consider this. Supposing I’d written ‘among writers who, I’d have thought, should know better,’ would that still look correct to you?
Because I can guarantee that to writers/editors of The Times, The Sunday Times,The Daily Telegraph, and of any number of upmarket journals, the interpolation would immediately turn ‘who’ into the object of whatever clause they think they are writing (spoiler: it doesn’t) and ‘who’ would become ‘whom’. It looks better, right? As in this example from The Sunday Times, 17th September, 2023, about Ruth Goodman’s terrifying encounter with the Yorkshire Ripper:
She flew into her boyfriend’s arms, spewing a jumble of words about the man behind her, whom she was convinced had been about to pounce on her.’
If you drop the indirect speech indicator, ‘she was convinced’, you are left with ‘whom had been about to pounce on her,’ which is as grammatically correct as saying ‘him was about to pounce’ or ‘me was reading the newspaper,’ i.e., not at all. Because adding phrases such as ‘he thought’, ‘it was said’, ‘it is widely believed’ etc (as newspapers tend to, a lot) does not change the subject of the main clause into the object.
That is why I am whomsick. Sick of this sad abuse of ‘whom’, all in the cause of a misguided idea of elegance. Yes, I know, nobody cares, language moves on, blah blah. No one even notices, perhaps.
But I do.
Just wait till I get on to the overuse of ‘fewer’….
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Comments
Thanks as ever for a thought provoking post.
I wonder if Ridout was related to Alan Ridout, the composer?