Is the Bell Really Tolling for Whom?

Last time, we saw just how often modern speakers and writers — or at least, with my evidence, modern television pundits — don’t use the expected nominative or accusative case of the pronouns I/me, we/us, he/him, she/her, and they/them. Some of you were shocked at the scandalously ungrammatical sentences that I cited; others read with a ho-hum indifference. (It’s one of the big divisions in modern American society, which is close to 50–50 on so many points.) Those are five of the six pairs that change their form according to whether the pronoun functions as a subject or an object. The sixth is who/whom.

For ages now, commentators have been proclaiming the imminent death of whom. We are now 102 years removed from this statement by the linguistic philosopher Edward Sapir: “Within a couple of hundred years from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying ‘Whom did you see?’ By that time the whom will be . . . delightfully archaic.”