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by gerard
3035 days ago
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A common rule for determining whether “who” or “whom” is right is to substitute “she” for “who,” and “her” for “whom,” and see which sounds the better. Take the sentence, “He met a woman who they said was an actress.” Now if “who” is correct then “she” can be used in its place. Let us try it. “He met a woman she they said was an actress.” That instantly rings false. It can’t be right. Hence the proper usage is “whom.”
-- Thurber /s https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/26c3v4/was_... On a more serious note, and not to claim right or wrong, I was taught in primary school that "whom" should be used as the object of a preposition "she, to whom I gave," or "she, with whom I studied," but never as a direct object; "who do you know?", not "whom do you know?". No idea if the latter is a geographical artifact or just what's taught nowdays. Speakers of slavic languages would recognise those first two usages as the dative (кому, komu, etc) and instrumental case (кем, kým, etc) respectively, and afaict in Old English the dative hwǣm was used for both. I suppose the direct object "whom do you know" came to popularity through more creative use somewhere along the line. |
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