Who vs. Whom (or Why Yoda Would Want to Keep Whom)

Who vs. Whom (or Why Yoda Would Want to Keep Whom)

Edward Sapir tells us that we don’t “chafe” at using sentences like “Whom did you see?” “without reason.” We hesitate to use “whom” in an interrogative sentence. Other relative and interrogative pronouns (which, what, that) do not differentiate between objective and subjective forms. “Whom,” then, seems to hint at a pattern that is not shared by words it would appear to be related to. One solution is to get rid of whom because the who/whom relationship is not found in which/what/that. Got it? Well, remember the scene in The Princess Bride when Wesley is insulting Prince Humperdink and telling him all the horrible—oops, I mean horrific—acts of mutilation and torture that he will inflict on the Prince? Wesley goes on and on…much like I’m about to do here.

The other reason why “whom” feels wrong to us is because of its relationship to interrogative adverbs such as how, when, and where. These, too, are not inflected and always possess the same outer form. Sapir thought that the tendency in interrogatives was to be constant and uninflected. Another reason why we should banish the whom. But wait…there’s another reason for abandoning whom: the difference between the subjective and objective pronouns is directly related to differences in position. E.g., we say “I saw him” and “He saw me”, but we don’t say “Him he saw.” (Sapir argues that constructions like “Him told he” are archaic and poetic and “against the drift of the language.” And in the interrogative sense, we never say, “Him did you see?” (Unless you’re Yoda.) Again, Sapir: “It is only in sentences of the type ‘Whom did you see?’ that an inflected objective before the verb is used at all.” Whom is needed, though, because the interrogative pronoun must come at the beginning of the sentence—e.g., “Where did you go?” or “When will you be here?” Thus, the solution to this conundrum is to keep the interrogative at the beginning of the sentence and not inflect it so that it is more in step with the prevailing patterns of the language. Thus, Who did you see? is where the language is headed, and not without good reasons.

Sapir is awesome.