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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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

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

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...

"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?)

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

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