Via The Millions, an Atlantic blog post on the death of “America’s least favorite pronoun”: the dreaded “whom.”
It always feels like society is crumbling when big linguistic changes occur, but as Megan Garber points out, even notorious grammar stickler William Safire advised rewriting sentences to avoid using the objective-case equivalent of “who.”
If “whom” really did die out, traditionalists would mourn, but at least they wouldn’t have to deal with people overcorrecting in an attempt to sound formal. “Who am I speaking to?” beats “A man whom has worked tirelessly” any day.
