947: Whom Jul 13, 2017

To whom will it matter if the word 'whom' stops being used?

In Old English and, to a far lesser extent, Middle English, grammatical cases that indicate the syntax of a word with suffixes were used consistently for pretty much all nouns and pronouns, but this eventually disappeared with the exception of some pronouns like 'I' and 'me', or 'he' and 'him'. Native speakers of English can tell the different ways the word 'she' as opposed to 'her' would be used for the most part, even if they could not articulate the precise reasoning as for why; as a sidetone, third-person pronouns are also the only real remnant of grammatical gender as well. In the case of 'whom' however, though it is used to indicate that it is an object of a verb in the same way as 'him' would be, it is not used with the same concern or frequency, and people would be just as likely to understand "who were you talking to" as "whom were you talking to". This issue however is not likely to result in the disappearance of 'whom' in any immediate way, as it has been noted that the usage of whom is not significantly different than it was in the late 16th century. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians in the 19th century who gave rules such to not end a clause with a preposition, while having little success in general at managing the manner in which people speak, might have done 'whom' a disservice when they said had to be used as an object instead of 'who'. By making the word seem overly formal, and perhaps making people worried about embarrassing themselves using it in the wrong situations, it tends to be used only formally or literarily.