prescriptivism

Mark Odegard markodegard at HOTMAIL.COM
Fri Feb 2 00:29:12 UTC 2001


Beverly Flanigan writes

--
I am a user myself of "whom" following a prep. (in fact, I had to insist an
editor change 'who' to 'whom' after a prep. in one of my articles!), but
'who' sounds, and even reads, better to me now in other contexts.  And
besides, as Larry noted, I'd rather see generalized 'who' than a
hypercorrected 'whom' where no "ordinary" person would use it!
--

Exactly. Unless supported by a preposition, 'whom' does not come naturally
to me. And I've learned that a universal use of 'who' will be passed over
silently by even the nastiest of hypercorrective prescriptivists, but one
misused 'whom' gets a viciously applied red pencil. This a piece of solid
advice I give to all E2L students.

It's probably to early to hold Whom's funeral, but it will be soon enough.
We are, I think, witnessing the death the objective pronouns in our own
lifetimes. Why do I use 'us' in the subject position (usually before plural
nouns), as with 'us Americans', 'us men'?

Perhaps we need to monitor the health of the 3rd person singular in the
verbs. Is English getting ready to stop being an inflected language?



_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com



More information about the Ads-l mailing list