| I'm not pretending anything. I'm not saying you shouldn't use "whom". You have a reasonable view of different registers, except for the part where you believe that "whom" has to "die off" before "who" can be fully correct in this usage, or that "who" is any kind of mistake. The words are just both correct. Some people like to argue from authority that there's some rule against using "who" there, except -- as is the case for many prescriptive bogeymen -- the supposed authority actually doesn't exist at all. Ask anyone who scientifically studies the actual English language for a living -- fenomas's comment links to a good source at Cambridge, which is very well reputed in linguistics -- and they will not cast a single bit of doubt on using "who" to introduce a relative clause. Everyone uses it, including very good writers. It's easy to caricature linguists as always saying "as long as you can be understood, anything goes". And that's unfortunate -- nobody here would put up with misunderstanding and making fun of the work biologists do, for example, but for some reason everyone thinks that being literate makes them qualified to disagree with linguists. There are linguists who make recommendations about not just how to be understood but how to write well, based on lots of study and observation on how people use language in all registers, and if you're looking for an authority you should be looking to them. If you do look -- I'll point at fenomas's comment again, because he's the only one who actually linked a source -- you'll find they don't support your position. It's too bad you took a lot of English classes that wasted time on correcting this word. (Editing out a harsh and hasty conclusion I came to about your English professors here.) If I assume the best of them, I'll say it was a pedagogical exercise. Sometimes it's important to distinguish different cases. This isn't a situation where you have to distinguish cases in English, but you can. So maybe your classes told you to use "whom" there kind of like a class in object-oriented programming might tell you to create a "class Rabbit" that inherits from "class Animal" -- as a way of showing that you understand the concept, not as something that you'd actually have to do in the real world. |