Re: "To whom"

>On another side note, if the dropping of whom should be considered
>the standard just because people do it all the time, then maybe
>"could of" and "definatly" should also be considered the correct
>forms, and everything else be decried as arrogance.
>
>
>
But the problem is, these are far from being standard in the written
language. On the other hand, I hear "whom" practically never in speech,
and only see it extremely rarely in print even in formal books that have
been printed this century, and see postponed prepositions used to form
oblique relatives all the time (ie it IS the standard written usage). I
mean, I study maths and read maths textbooks for my course and
linguistics books as a hobby, and you can't get a greater group of
pedants than mathematicians and linguists. Yet apparently they're all
writing non-standard English by not using "whom". How can "whom" be the
formal written standard if practically no one uses it in writing outside
of a few proverbs and phrases (and if we accept them as evidence, we
have to accept evidence that a whole lot of other long dead things
fossilized in sayings are still grammatical in English)? I'm sorry, but
I just can't accept that it's still in widespread use even in the
written language because I read large numbers of books on a wide range
of topics, from fiction to very technical and formal books, and I
practically never come across it in anything written this century. And I
certainly never hear anyone say it where I live outside of those one or
two old fashioned set phrases. To me any relative formed with whom only
sounds borderline grammatical: it's not just old fashioned, it feels wrong.

Replies