For ‘whom’, the bell tolls
Image: Macfadden Publications via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
When was the last time you wrote ‘whom’? When was the last time you said it? I’ll bet the former happened more recently than the latter. As any change in the spoken language is invariably the precursor to a change in the written language, the writing has been on the wall — so to speak — for ‘whom’ for quite some time.
Ernest Hemingway, plain language’s gruff and hirsute poster-boy, clearly felt comfortable deploying the phrase in the title of his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, although he was quoting John Donne’s phrase from 300 years earlier. He probably wouldn’t have used it ‘straight up, no chaser’ in the body of the text.
In fact, we probably have to go back almost to Donne to find a time when the word was used without any self-consciousness. And then it would have been in the company of a host of other ancient pronouns such as thee, thou and thine.
So when can you use ‘whom’ anyway? Simply put, it’s the usage of ‘who’ when it’s the object of the verb. In our example above, whom is the (indirect) object of the verb ‘tolls’. But no-one is going to misinterpret if you write ‘who’, are they? Perhaps they might just think, ‘Urgh, that sounds ugly.’
In fact, that’s about the best reason I can think of to retain ‘whom’ for occasional and judicious deployment — it can prevent ugliness. Not always, but often enough for us to keep ‘whom’ stored in our linguistic arsenal for a little while longer.
