More on WHen to Use "Who" and "Whom"

More on When to Use "Who" and "Whom"

by Tina Blue

Oct. 25, 2003

In "The Case for Pronouns" I explain how to determine the proper case of pronouns. As I point out in that article, the pronoun that gives people the most trouble is "who" and its objective case "whom." This trouble spills over onto the forms "whoever" and "whomever" as well. In that article I offer several examples of "whom" misused where "who" is needed, but the issue is so confusing for so many people that I think it worthwhile to explain it in more detail.

I actually believe that "whom" is on its way out, but as standard written grammar is naturally conservative, it will take some time for that process to be completed. How long? I'm guessing a few decades, at least.

In the meantime, anyone who wants to be considered capable of writing correctly will have to submit to the rules governing the proper use of pronoun case with "who[m]" In fact, this issue is a shibboleth,* and anyone who violates the rules on "who[m]" will be pounced upon by the Self Appointed Grammar Police.* Therefore, as troublesome as it may seem, you must learn to use the cases of this pronoun correctly.

Sometimes the confusion over which case of "who" to use is caused by what I call "clutter." In other words, when the sentence has a number of other elements (i.e., phrases and clauses) embedded into its main clause, it might be a bit difficult to figure out whether "who" is acting in a role requiring the nominative (subject) case or the objective case.

Here are a couple of sentences from an article in The New York Times (25 Oct. 2003), a newspaper that, one would like to think, has competent editors on board to catch errors in grammar and usage. The second example is correct, but the first one is wrong.

~Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a respected Democratic voice on defense matters, agreed that the memorandum revealed just how much information the Pentagon is not sharing with members of Congress, whom he said are growing increasingly restive about being kept in the dark.

~But some said they had been heartened by Mr. Bush's decision to consolidate decision-making about Iraq under Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, whom they described as having more sensitive political antennas than Mr. Rumsfeld.

Let's take a look at the relevant clauses in each example, stripped of the clutter.

In the first sentence, the clause containing "whom" includes an "aside," the attributive comment "he said," which is not part of the main flow of the clause. The clause itself, without the attributive aside, reads

. . . whom . . . are growing increasingly restive about being kept in the dark.

Obviously, then, "whom" is in the wrong case. The sentence should read:

~Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a respected Democratic voice on defense matters, agreed that the memorandum revealed just how much information the Pentagon is not sharing with members of Congress, who he said are growing increasingly restive about being kept in the dark

The error occurred when the writer mistook "who[m]" for a direct object of the verb "said" in the clause "he said," even though that clause has absolutely nothing to do with the role of "who" in this sentence.

In the second example, "whom is used correctly:

In this sentence the relevant clause is "whom they described." This clause is inverted, so that the direct object ("whom") precedes the verb ("described"). In natural order the clause would read, "they described whom."

But what about all that other stuff, that clutter? Well, "as having more sensitive political antennas than Mr. Rumsfeld" is a prepositional-gerund phrase.* The gerund "having" is the object of the preposition "as," and the entire prepositional phrase is simply an adjectival modifier, describing the pronoun "whom."

Modifiers are simply not relevant to determining the case of a pronoun in a clause. The only thing that is relevant is whether the pronoun serves in a slot that takes the nominative case or in a slot that takes the objective case. Since the direct object of a verb must be in the objective case, "whom" is the proper form for the object of the verb "described."

So whenever you have to choose a case for "who," simply strip away all the clutter and figure out which slot (function, role) "who[m]" is filling in the sentence. And if the clause is inverted, rearrange it. Once you do that, the proper case will become obvious.

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*I explain about grammatical shibboleths in "Shibboleth Alert: Use 'Like' Only as a Preposition, NOT as a Conjunction."

*The "Self-Appointed Grammar Police" now have their own (tongue-in-cheek) website. To visit them, click here.