Grammar Moses: To whom it may concern
•April 24, 2024•
I remember as if it were yesterday the last email I received from Ted “Dictionary Man” Utchen in the spring of 2021 shortly before he died. It was all about how people’s brains misfire when they think about whether to use “who” or “whom.”
“Dear Mr. Grammarian: Today I write to you about the problem with ‘who’ and ‘whom.’ (It) is simply that people pay insufficient attention to how they are writing when they write. Or perhaps they flunked fifth-grade English, who knows?” he wrote. “Now, in today’s Daily Herald you can read, ‘The major lenders have undergone an evaluation of … WHO they’ll approve.’ Now the error is that the verb ‘approve’ is taking an object, and it should have read ‘WHOM they’ll approve.’
Reader George Dorner reminded me of this constant struggle more recently.