Rock, Paper, Shotgun

30/06/2010 at 14:06 Sulkdodds says:

In all honesty, ‘whom’ no longer has much of a place in our language. It’s an inflectional hangover from Anglo-Saxon, but not one that has often been widely used; traditionally it applies in a dative case that doesn’t properly exist anymore, while its application to a wider ‘objective’ case is so rare nowadays that it’s difficult to describe it as an ordinary part of the tongue. It is only ever insisted on when preceded by a preposition – “to whom”, “for whom,” and so on. But even this usage is bound up with the traditional ban on ending a sentence with a proposition, and THAT rule is an invention of 18th century grammarians imposing the rules of Latin onto English; it is, to paraphrase Churchill, the sort of nonsense up with which we need not put. I imagine the same vogue for Latin imposition lies behind the persistence into the modern age of any scrupulous distinction between who and whom. Ironic that rules transplanted from an ancient foreign tongue should be used to prop up a native relic, but there you go.

All of this means that ‘whom’ is of limited use. In fact, it’s so rarely encountered in ordinary conversation, or even journalism, that its primarily purpose is increasingly mere snobbery. To know about it is to be a linguist or a purist, and to use it strictly, that there is a True Proper Right Language and that you are one of the few who speaks it. That may not be the intention but it’s usually the unfortunate implication. Whom is fast becoming only a marker of status, as when one drops French phrases into one’s English, or, indeed, when one says ‘one’.

So nah, I reckon ‘who’ is fine.