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Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

Now I want to know the following:

1) Will he hire people who can't tell active voice from passive? (Check out the Language Log archives for how many grammar and style nazis can't tell the difference.)

2) Does he require that you can tell who and whom apart and use them in their correct cases?

If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors in Linguistics ;-)

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> If the answer is "yes" to both of these then I would assume that the people who pass the test are English majors with minors in Linguistics ;-)

I don't know. I am not a native speaker, and am not an English major, but the answer is "yes" to both of them.

Am I understanding you correctly that you are saying people can't make out active and passive between "I wrote a letter", "A letter was written by me"?

"Who" and "whom" is a bit tricky, but I follow the rule about "who -> he"(who broke the vase? he did), "whom -> him"(whom do you trust? him). There might be edge cases I am unaware of.

First, "whom" today is more or less reserved for formulaic usage. You write "To whom it may concern," but you don't say "Whom did you meet yesterday?" If you start rigidly using whom as objective (a use that Sapir noted was dying in 1912), you sound stilted and put people off. It's the sort of grammar nazi thing that alienates customers.

Similarly passive voice, split infinitives, etc. all sound like great rules until you realize that there are plenty of cases where these so-called rules are actually good to break. For example, perhaps his productivity would more than double if he would stop worrying about whether his employees split their infinitives.

"Whom" is also almost impossibly archaic and no longer considered part of modern English (having almost completely fallen out of usage around the start of the 20th century). It survives almost entirely in discussions of when to use it and almost never appears in modern writing except as a demonstration of what linguists call a "prestige form".

"To whom did you give it?" vs. "Who did you give it to?" the latter is more modern and natural in modern English.

Huh. Really? I use whom all the time, and most of my friends do as well. Granted, a) we're all snobs, and b) we don't use it in every case we should, but we still use it.

Maybe we're part of this little post 2000 resurgence: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whom&year_s...

So ask yourself the question, why not "thee", "thou" and "thy" (and relevant possessive forms)? I'm not saying "whom" is wrong only that it is archaic. Reviving just that word seems rather capricious and arbitrary no?

they have their place. i saw a lovely translation recently of a french request to "tutoyer" (address in the familiar) as "i must be thee to thou".

"Whom" makes you sound a bit dated. Etymologists will get the joke. ;-)

(I suppose I should explain it. "Whom" comes from a dative case, and would is not descended from a word that would be used for direct objects, but only for a subset of indirect objects and prepositional objects. However if elative uses relate to elated things, then surely dative uses in English relate to dated things, right?)

I would say "whom" today is reserved for formulaic usage.

In 1912, Edward Sapir ("Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech") noted the death of "whom." The example he gave was "Whom did you see yesterday" vs "Who did you see yesterday?"

Granted there are some cool things you can do with who/whom, like:

'Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome tae yer gory bed,

Or tae victorie.'

Of course that's 18th century Scottish and things have changed a bit....

Sapir was exactly who I was thinking of.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ofgrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=f...

Chapter 7 I believe is the relevant chapter.

That's a wonderful book isn't it? Really expands your ideas of what grammar is and could be.

There's an Allan Sherman song ("When I Was a Lad") where one of the rhymes depends on who/whom:

I learned who was going out with whom

And who had the keys to the powder room

There's also Lenin's famous line "Who? Whom?", which is a lot harder to translate without a "whom" available....

"Whom" is uncommon but by no means archaic in British English. I think it's just American English where the form has disappeared.

For example, consider "Are you responsible if papers were left on your desk?"

Passive voice.

I don't know. English is a second language here in India, and the grammar covered in schools is pretty basic, and still I would wager most of people would recognize it's passive voice.

The reason why that error is so common among American English speakers though is that we are mistakenly taught that voices apply to sentences and so passive voice in a subordinate clause gets ignored. So you have the issue that "Are you responsible" is active voice but "if papers were left on your desk" is passive.

But this also gets to the problem of avoiding the passive voice which too many grammarians push, which is that there are times when the use of passive voice clarifies things.

The question, "Are you responsible if papers are left on your desk?" illustrates this very well. The questioner assumes it doesn't matter who left the papers on the desk, and there is no way to better word the sentence.

So in this discussion I have intentionally split infinitives (to emphasize that the goal is to do better at wording sentences), and illustrated why the passive voice is great, and in so doing have probably permanently disqualified myself from a job where grammar nazis rule.

Why not?

A friend of mine was an English major who went on to do programming for several startups. He's still a programmer.

It's an incredibly fitting path, especially for him. He's a stickler for detail and writes beautiful code.

My point was that it becomes a small pool of potential hires. I was a history major with a love of natural language, btw.

Or have English as a second language.

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