NGM Blog Central - Whoo Cares? - National Geographic Magazine

I’m not a stickler when it comes to applying so-called rules of grammar, but sometimes I fall into sticklerdom. (Many of the “rules” we learned in school are really just usage conventions. There are rules for subject-verb agreement: “I am,” not “I is.” Not ending a sentence with a preposition is a convention, not a universal rule.) One thing that hits my stickler nerve, though, is the correct use of whom.

“Who are you going to call?” came across my desk in an article I was copyediting. “Whom are you going to call?” is grammatically correct but stilted. Using “who” in these cases is common in conversations. In formal writing, however, it’s considered incorrect. When we’ve used “who” instead of “whom” in such constructions in the pages of National Geographic, we get letters from sticklers. I hate to flout the rule, but I also don’t want our writing to sound wooden.

What to do? A lot of advice has been written about "who" versus "whom," but the best I’ve come across is from William Safire, who wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1990: “The best rule for dealing with who vs. whom is this: Whenever whom is required, recast the sentence. This keeps a huge section of the hard disk of your mind available for baseball averages.”

Following Safire’s advice, I asked the editor to recast the sentence. The editor obliged, and then she gave me a picture of an owl. “If you were an owl,” she told me, “you would definitely say ‘whom’.”

—David Brindley

Posted by Lesley Rogers | Comments (1)
Filed Under: Grammar, Rogers' Rules of Order

Email this post »

Subscribe to RSS feed