As a linguist, I can say resolutely that your prescriptivism is basically pounding your fists against the immovable brick wall of change. All types of case are rapidly disappearing from English. It's a continuing trend and has been for hundreds of years. The ambiguity generated is a trade-off people make for a variety of conveniences, let alone to fit in.
The subjunctive mood is basically gone from practiced speech, too. None of it is terribly worth lamenting.
In fact, changing it to "whom" would do nothing more than alienate its large-scale market, who aren't all leather elbow pads and Strunk & White, but rather real people who exercise language outside of the confines of a book report.
Sorry, dude. It's just not worth getting bent out of shape about.
I think that's the point. Good writing often doesn't make sense on a literal level. Apart from this, my favorite example from recently: "and with Kevin Garnett and the newly-signed Jermaine O’Neal, Danny Ainge has just successfully assembled the greatest collection of big men in the history of 2002." http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2010/08/luke-harangody-boston-...
Without Shaq's name in there, I had to read the article in order to understand the humor of the quote: the Celtics now have Shaq and Jermaine O'Neal and Kevin Garnett all on one team; in 2002 (when they were near their collective prime), that collection of big men would have been unstoppable.
I suppose we could look at this from an external perspective and actually see some good: Deprecating the subjunctive makes English easier to learn for non-native speakers.
Yay! Thank you for saying that. All the armchair grammarians in Twitter-land tut-tutting over this has been bugging me but I couldn't put it as eloquently as you have. Nice job.
To come back with a predictable response: everyone says "who" even if they mean "whom". Using "whom", even if it is grammatically correct, is perceived to be wrong in most conversational situations, or other informal situations like Twitter.
Anyway, the quick guide: if you would say "him/her", use "whom", and if you would say "he/she", use "who".
"Who is that?" ... "He is the programmer."
"To whom is the message addressed?" ... "It is addressed to him."
He -> Who / Him -> Whom
But who wouldn't say "Who is it addressed to?" You'd sound like the posh bloke from an Ealing Comedy if you used "whom" all the time.
I've always used whom, but now I live in Canada I find myself missing it more often than I did in England. Perhaps it's just that I was taught when to use who and whom.
Almost certainly that one. Mr Burns, is that you? You've had me accessing bits that hadn't been scrubbed in a long time and have suffered some rot. Have you just arrived at number 63 or just left? There's a Dorset LUG if you're interested.
Morse can be cheesy, but I thought it was a cultural reference that Americans may know. :-)
"The best rule for dealing with who vs. whom is this: Whenever whom is required, recast the sentence. This keeps a huge section of the hard disk of your mind available for baseball averages."
Put this in the "most people don't care" bin along with the subjunctive mood, which I see intelligent people failing to use more often than not.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me that the who/whom distinction in North American English has been ignored so much for a long enough period of time to say that ignoring it is now correct. On the other hand, the distinction is still commonly observed in British English, I think. So basically Victoria Coren is asking twitter to rewrite things in her dialect. I guess she's free to ask. And maybe they should do some internationalization...
Just because lazy people in North America couldn't be bothered working it out any more doesn't mean Twitter shouldn't set a good example. Ignoring it is not correct, the distinction is correct. It's not a dialect, either, given that it's, uh, the original.
Given that there already is an official distinction between "American English" and "British English", I don't think your comment is very correct. It might be just another rule to add (actually remove) in the A.E. schoolbooks.
Languages evolve. If enough people drop "whom" in America, arguing about this change would be like arguing about whether sweets or candy is "correct".
This still doesn't make it a dialect though :) Sorry, but it just annoys me to see American English fanatics say how British English is "wrong", or a "dialect" of American English when it was the original base of American English to start with :)
I do agree with you, languages evolve. But that doesn't mean we should just drop grammar altogether. I was a little snappy in my original response, and I apologise for that, but the sentiment is still the same.
Saying American English evolved from British English is just as false as the reverse, and just as false as saying humans evolved from monkeys. Both evolved from a common ancestor. British English has changed just as much as American English has since they began to split in the 17-18th centuries.
Often times proper grammar isn't the best approach from a marketing standpoint. Look at apple's use of, "the funnest _ yet" slogans that they used for a while. Catering to the most commonly used vernacular is generally a better strategy from a marketing perspective.
I'm going out on a limb here, but my bet is that the mistake is on purpose.
Depending on your target demographic obviously. If you're aiming for the general market then you're absolutely right, you'll hit more birds with your stones if you talk to people on their level. However, if you're aiming college grads or PhD grads, you're probably going to annoy them if you're letting grammatical errors enter your marketing.
I've closed BBC news articles when there's been a grammatical mistake in the first paragraph. I didn't pay my License Fee in the UK for them to abuse it with bad news.
I have to say that the BBC news has more spelling and grammar errors per thousand words than most blogs I read.
... now let me try desperately to bring this back on topic by saying that I think the thread above blaming Britain for grammatical prescriptivism is way off. Strunk and White popularized some prescriptions unknown in the UK (such as not using "which" in the role of "that") and in my thoroughly anecdotal experience Americans spell [by the conventions of the country they're in] significantly better than Brits do.
Maybe Twitter should consider changing to "Whom to follow" as the quirkiness would stand out to those unfamiliar with "whom". May help partially offset the slight staidness.
Victoria Coren's had an interesting career. Writer, TV presenter, including _Balderdash and Piffle_ connected to the Oxford English Dictionary, poker player, and porn film maker, though just the once. It's nice to see see someone well known, in the UK at least, show their pedant side. Hopefully, her appearance on news.yc will make twitter take note. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Coren
If the fans of BE want to win these things, they need to work on the Indians, not the Americans. (The US doesn't look to the UK for language lessons. We fight amongst ourselves.) Of course, even winning the "world-wide English" wars may not be enough to influence Americans.
I can't speak on the issue of the German language, but France has the Académie Française, whose job it is to standardize the language and approve new changes. They carry no legal clout, but where they go, the french language usually follows.
I'm not convinced that it should be 'whom'. It's a sentence fragment. It's not a subject or an object of a sentence. Replacing 'who' with 'he' or 'him' makes no sense either way.
And lastly: It's not a novel or paper. It's just a quick phrase used artistically. With 'whom' is sounds stuffy and out of place. 'Who' sounds correct in the context, and hits the target audience.
You test with "he" versus "him" in the reply to the question, not by replacing "who/whom" in the question itself. So the answer to "whom to follow" is "follow him", not "follow he".
The same goes for Facebook's blatant abuse of the neuter singular "their" instead of "his/her" -- which really can be resolved most of the time since Facebook usually possess people's genders.
The subjunctive mood is basically gone from practiced speech, too. None of it is terribly worth lamenting.
In fact, changing it to "whom" would do nothing more than alienate its large-scale market, who aren't all leather elbow pads and Strunk & White, but rather real people who exercise language outside of the confines of a book report.
Sorry, dude. It's just not worth getting bent out of shape about.