🚀 go-pugleaf

 The word "whom" seems to be disappearing from English except in
 contexts where it immediately follows a preposition. These are
 relatively formal, as revealed by Karen Stanley's concordance search.
 But I think the majority of American speakers would choose to end a
 sentence with a prepostion, as in "This is the girl who I went to the
 movies with," rather than use the stilted locution "with whom."
>
 I do teach the distinction between "who" and "whom" to intensive
 students who are about to begin college classes, but it's not high on
 my list of grammatical priorities. Most understand the principle, but
 they can't employ it properly or consistently, and I don't want to
 waste time drilling it into their heads at the expense of other more
 important things. I would much prefer my students work on things like
 subject-verb agreement and sentence combining, trusting they will
 gradually master the use of "whom" in primarily written and
 particularly academic discourse.
>
 Ainslie Balwin asks, "What generally do we take as our authority for
 acceptable language change?" I hope we can trust our instincts and
 avoid authoritarian or prescriptive grammar in favor of our own
 observations of what is commonly used in various contexts. Note, for
 example, that I begin a sentence above with "but"; this isn't a
 question of grammar but of style. It's acceptable because many other
 writers do it and because I don't overuse it.
>
 Tom Davis
 Seattle Central Community College
 Seattle, Washington, USA
 tdavis@sccd.ctc.edu
>

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