One of the most difficult areas of English, is the use of the pronouns Who and Whom.
In general, most people say and write who, rather than whom. Even when people write whom, it's not always right. People tend to use a certain word, because they think it's right but get it wrong. We call this hyper correction.
As a graduate in English, this sort of thing fascinates me. Unlike Lie versus lay, which is a question of semantics, who versus whom is purely grammatical. I suspect that few if any moderators will penalize an author for misusing these pronouns, unless it is obviously and consistently wrong and it rarely is.
To understand how to use these words correctly, we need to go back to basics. Most sentences have an object and a subject. In the sentence, I licked my dildo. I is the subject and dildo is the object. Put another way, the subject is the thing or person doing the verb. The object is the thing having something done to it.
In the same way, Who and Whom are the subject and object pronouns.
Take the sentence, 'The girl who borrowed my dildo, has left the country.'
Here the girl is the subject of the verb borrowed, therefore the correct pronoun is 'Who.' To test this, you can re-write the sentence by replacing the pronoun who/whom with the relevant personal pronoun. So you get, 'She borrowed my dildo, and left the country.' Since 'She' is a subject pronoun, we know that the correct pronoun is who.
As an extra test, it also sounds right!
Next we look at the case where the pronoun is the object. For example,
'The girl to whom I lent my dildo, has left the country.' In this sentence the girl is the object of the verb lent, therefore the correct pronoun is whom.
Again, we can test this by substitution. So, you could say, 'I lent my dildo.' Therefore, 'I lent it to her.' Her being an object pronoun, we can be sure that whom is correct, in the original sentence. For it to be who, we would have to write 'I lent it to she,' which is obviously wrong!
So far so good?
Where it gets tricky, is when we turn the pronoun into a question, or in grammatical language, an interrogative. Which of the following two sentences is grammatically correct?
1. 'Who did she ask about borrowing my dildo?'
2. 'Whom did she ask about borrowing my dildo?'
I bet 90 out of 100 people would say it's No. 1.
Actually, No. 2 is right.
Remember the basics? The person doing the asking is the subject, so in this case the person being asked is the object. Then it's quite easy. Whom, we've been told is an object pronoun. Again substituting, we have two alternatives.
Did she ask her about borrowing my dildo? Her being the object, we know that it must be whom in the original question.
The alternative would be:
Did she ask she about borrowing my dildo? This makes no sense, so while Who might sound 'right' it must be wrong.
The same general principles apply with whoever and whomever and if you're still reading this, you need to get out more.
Danny xxx
Head Penguin
A steamy lesbian three way
