I was reading Dear Abby today, and I came across the following gem of a sentence given as a suggested response to someone to whom you do not wish to disclose your choice of presidential candidate:

“Isn’t it great we live in a country where we can’t be persecuted or nagged for whom we vote for?”

I can only imagine the kind of vindictive prick that would utter such a biting retort, instead of just saying “I don’t want to tell you,” and I would therefore like to take this opportunity to offer an equally supercilious response to what I plan to demonstrate is attempted grammatical snobbery.

Notice that the sentence ends in the stranded preposition for. Stranding prepositions is something most people most people get riled up about up about which people get riled.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, or why the last sentence is funny, take the following example:

A: What are you looking for?

B: For what are you looking?

There are people who would tell you that the A is incorrect, or at least that it sounds informal, because the word for - a preposition - occurs at the end of the sentence instead of preceding the interrogative pronoun what.

I personally think they are insane, but, for the sake of argument, let’s grant it to them that B is more formal or proper - whatever that means.

Now, these same tightwads are also generally proponents of using the object form of the personal interrogative pronoun. Sorry for the grammarese, but that means the word whom.
Most sensible English speakers have no idea where whom occurs, and where who occurs. I can explain it, but it is a little more difficult to wrap your head around.

First you need to understand what an “object” is, and in the interest of keeping it simple, you can just remember that if it’s a noun, and it’s not the subject of the verb, it’s the object.
So in the following sentences, the objects are in blue and red.

Frederick swallowed a peach seed.
I sent my congressman anthrax.
They will hum Daft Punk in the shower.

Second, you need to know that sometimes, for various reasons, stuff gets “replaced” by “question words” and those question words show up in strange places.

Normal: The transient accosted the mannequin.
What did the transient accost?
I saw what the transient accosted.

You see, in the second two sentences, the word mannequin is gone, because it has been replaced by what, and the word what is popping up somewhere other than after accosted. The word what is easy, because it doesn’t change based on whether it is a subject or object, but when the question word replaces a person, we run into the who/whom problem:

Normal: The transient accosted the day trader.
Who(m) did the transient accost?
I saw who(m) the transient accosted.

These sentences should technically have whom, because the question word replaced an object: day-trader. However, it’s hard to tell, because the question words have a pesky tendency of floating around, so you can’t tell where they came from. That is why people have trouble.

We can pretty much agree though that if you use whom, you are one of three things: a 19th century aristocrat, a grammarian, or a pompous windbag.

Our friend from the Dear Abby column, who(m) I submit is just such a pompous windbag, nailed the use of whom, but forgot about stranding the preposition. Why would he/she allow such a blatant inconsistency in niveau de langage? Well, in this instance, you are forced to strand the preposition, lest you produce the following superb specimen of English prose:

“Isn’t it great we live in a country where we can’t be persecuted or nagged for for whom we vote?”

WTF?! Lesson learned. You can’t always avoid stranding the preposition, although I am sure the author at least tried not to.

The problem that I saw in the original sentence is that whom sounds silly if you leave strand the prepositon, because you are mixing levels of formality. Don’t believe me?

Normal: Who were you speaking to?
Formal: To whom were you speaking?
Normal/Formal: Whom were you speaking to?
Formal/Normal: To who were you speaking?

The last two sound like crap, because they can’t make their up minds if they are elevated tone or not.

The point is that our author wrote him/herself into a syntactic corner, where they were forced to strand the preposition, but rather than saying “screw it, I will sound like a normal chump for one sentence,” they just HAD to get that whom in there, even if it made them sound silly.

If you are wondering what I, in my infinite grammatical wisdom, would have said…

“I voted for Barack Obama, and I am proud of it!”

Suck it, you jerk.

Tags: Barack Obama, Dear Abby, Election, Grammar, Language, Whom

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.