Who vs. whom

Thank God He made people with different gifts. If everyone in the world had my particular gift set, there would be no technology: We would all be walking to work, not driving. And our work would consist of making houses out of cardboard boxes.

But I have always found grammar easy, and enjoyed sentence diagramming on the blackboard. So it was like dragging fingernails across that blackboard when I saw the instructions in the workbook we’re using in the English as a second language (ESL) class I’m helping teach at church: It says to use “who” where I know full well that the correct fill-in-the-blanks answer is “whom.”

The students are directed to replace the underlined groupings of words (italicized in the examples below) in a sentence with one of the selections from a list that includes “how,” “how long,” how many,” “what,” “what kind of,” “when,” “where,” “who,” and “why.” The sentences are simple ones, like “She lost her purse.” The students are to construct a question eliciting the answer. Thus, in this case, the question being prompted is “What did she lose?” “We did our exercises at the beach” requires the response, “Where did we do our exercises?”

But what do you do with “I met the president”? Or “She gave a present to her cousin”? Sister Irene taught me in the 1960s that direct objects (the first sentence) and indirect objects (the second example) call for “whom,” not “who,” as pronoun replacements. To my dismay, “whom” is not found in the list of offerings.

The trouble is that no one ever says “whom” anymore. That’s just a fact. Lynne Truss, the persnickety English woman who wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves, uses “whom,” but she’s the only one left on the planet. Superior breeds of journalists use “whom” in their professional writing but not in their conversation.

So what’s an ESL teacher to do? Do I go along with the slippage and decadence of the culture and teach “who” for “whom,” holding my nose all the while? Or do I tilt at windmills and die on the hill of “whom” for the principle of it?

When the demographic constituting your classroom would be content to simply have a successful outing at the Social Security office, does one fuss about grammatical rectitude? And yet, and yet, shall I deceive the trusting seekers utterly by pretending I’m OK with “who”?

God help me, I blush to confess that I went along with the decline of Western civilization and gave not even a passing mention to the “who/whom” issue.

But here is the point of this meditation. Though I am evidently willing to sell out when it comes to faithfulness to Shakespeare, I will not do so when it comes to betraying the Word of God. If I see something in Scripture and am convinced that the Lord has said what He said, I don’t care if the world slips away and that truth becomes unfashionable: I will prefer embarrassment to treachery. Treachery against the English language, now that is another matter.

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