What I Hate About Whom ...

Lately, every "whom" I see seems so unnatural to me. Right, wrong -- it doesn't matter. It still takes me out of the writing.

Of course, if I were the editor, I definitely would have used "whom" here -- just because you get so much guff if you don't. But still ...

Whom Can We Rely On, New York Times?

In this New York Times grammar quiz, the failure to use "whom" is actually counted as an error of sorts in the question 7 in the passage: "If we can’t rely on the marketers or the government or even the nutritionists to guide us through the supermarket woods, then who can we rely on?"

The reason, the Times says, is that: "If the correct grammar — in this case, 'whom' — sounds stuffy, we should try to find a deft way to rephrase a sentence to make it both fluid and correct."

The key word is "try," which means it's not mandatory, which means the sentence is fine as-is.

The only alternative would be to consider "to rely on" off limits in interrogative uses like this.

Weird.

Copy Edit du Jour

I follow many Twitter users whom I think give great advice

changed to:

I follow many Twitter users who I think give great advice

* * *

For those of you who, like the writer, find this one a little confusing, the need for a subject pronoun here is best illustrated with the choice: "I think THEM give great advice" versus "I think THEY give great advice." Cleary, the action of giving in that clause needs a subject, and "who," like "they," is a subject form.

So if I can so easily understand that, why am I still completely baffled by the Twitter phenomenon? Why would anyone care that I'm changing the cats' water or watching "Family Guy" reruns?

You know, back in my day, we had complete social disconnectedness -- and we liked it!

Monday Word Miscellany

Saw this in Paul Krugman’s NY Times column today:

Discussing the causes of that crisis, Mr. Summers pointed to things that the crisis countries lacked — and that, by implication, the United States had. These things included "well-capitalized and supervised banks" and reliable, transparent corporate accounting.

The lack of suspensive hyphenation caught my attention. I would have written "well-capitalized and -supervised banks.” I think a hyphen before "supervised" could have added just a tad more clarity.

Saw this in a U.S.News & World Report story on Yahoo today:

Research by Atlee Burpee, the world’s biggest seed company, found that $50 of seeds and fertilizer can yield $1,250 worth of produce.

Setting aside the incredible fun that is the name Atlee Burpee (finally, a name for my first-born, should such a first ever be born), what interested me here was “$1,250 worth of produce.” In non-numeric form, a structure like this is often considered a “quasi-possessive,” which calls for an apostrophe. “You can grow hundreds of dollars’ worth of produce.” But “$1,250’s worth of produce” would be (most would agree) silly. I never noticed that before.

From a Los Angeles Times headline this morning on an article about job hunting:

It’s still all about whom you know.

Whom? Really? What would I have done if I were the editor making the call on “who” versus “whom” here? I’m not sure. Yes, newspapers are held to a sometimes unreasonably high standard on using “whom,” but the expression “It’s who you know” is such a popular figure of speech that “whom” seems awkward here.

I suspect that, after agonizing over it a bit, I would have gone for “It’s all who you know” – then spent the next day letting all my calls go to voice mail.