Why is this news? _Whom_ has been a rarity for decades.
Questions like "Who did you give it to?" are far more common in normal speech than "To whom did you give it?", and have been since long before I was born.
Questions like "Who did you give it to?" are far more common in normal speech than "To whom did you give it?", and have been since long before I was born.
That contortion of a sentence comes from the old Prescriptivist rule "never end a sentence with a preposition". Never mind that it leads to such odd sentences as that, and a loss of clarity.
"Who did you hit?" and even "who hit who" have long been the norm in speech. The _whom_ version of those utterances would not often have passed the lips even of older, more educated English speakers in the last decade of the 20th century.
Here we are, nearly 20 years into this century and news is being published about the demise of a word that had almost entirely fallen out of common usage last century.
I noticed, but I wasn’t one of the many who wrote in to complain.
As a news item this is about as timely as the outbreak of the Iraq War.