Wednesday 17 June 2020

Who and Whom

Two very different, but significant, stories in the news had something in common today: a minor grammatical transgression, one that would escape the notice of many, but to my ear didn’t sound quite right.

Both were good-news stories: the one about the footballer, Marcus Rashford, who shamed the British PM into extending free school lunch vouchers through the summer; the other about the American Supreme Court decision to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In the former, the Guardian was alluding to a bit of dirt dug up by the Independent about Boris Johnson:

As for the prime minister … shortly before Marcus Rashford was born to a single mother who he idolises for her tireless work and sacrifices, Boris Johnson was writing that single mothers were producing a generation of “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children”. 

In the latter, widely reported, Senator Bernie Sanders was expressing his approval of the Supreme Court decision:

Fantastic news. No one in America should face discrimination for being who they are or for who they love," Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted. 

Did you read through those two sentences without hesitating, or did you pause for a moment, thinking something was a little off?

Now only the very scholarly will say, “Whom are you calling?” instead of “Who are you calling? or “To whom are you speaking? “ rather than “Who are you speaking to?”

But surely, “whom”, as the accusative or “objective” form of the pronoun “who”, is not quite dead yet. Of course, it survives in such formal statements as “To whom it may concern”, as the object of the preposition “to”, but even in everyday writing or speech, is there not a place for “whom” in sentences such as those I’ve quoted above, as the object of the verbs “idolize” and “love”?

...Marcus Rashford was born to a single mother whom he idolises for her tireless work and sacrifices...

and

No one in America should face discrimination for being who they are or for whom they love.

1 comment:

  1. French would agree with you since for us we have to use the accusative form : pour qui (for whom) à qui (to whom) so for a French it is easier to use the "proper form" :-)

    ReplyDelete