I was typing up some instructions at work earlier and I came across something that has always confused me.
When are you supposed to use 'whom' instead of 'who' - and while I'm at it - when should you use 'fewer' instead of 'less'?
I sort of know what sounds right but I don't know why. I've read explanations before but they're usually rather complicated and tend to be things that I understand whilst reading but confuse soon after.
So, explained simply, is there an easy rule to follow?
P.s. - I was thinking this thread could be used for others to get these kinds of questions answered.
Fewer is for a reduced number of things - "there are fewer students living in this area nowadays".
Less is for a reduced degree of something - "the students around here are less noisy".
To say "there are less students around" is just WRONG!
Who and whom is instinctive, I can't work out the actual rule for now.
While we're on the subject, the simple way to choose between "John and me" or "John and I" is to remove John and see whether it would be 'me' or 'I' in the same sentence if you were talking about you alone. (John and I went to the beach / the waves splashed John and me)
Apart from "Because this rule someone once made up has now become tradition," what is the reason for this strict division? Obviously putting fewer into the less sentence makes you sound retarded, but putting less into the fewer sentence is something that people would easily understand. Is there any reason regarding clarity of language that fewer cannot be substituted for less?
I've read threads on the internet about this subject before, and it always descends into arguments between people shouting "Because it is a RULE!" and "It is an arbitrary and pointless rule!" in various impolite ways, because, ya know, this is the internet. So I feel I should point out I'm not trying to troll, simply gain a deeper understanding of the matter.
Who did what to whom?
"To whom am I speaking?" You are speaking, the person spoken to is a whom.
"Who stabbed the merchant banker?" The who is the stabber; the subject of the verb.
"By whom was the merchant banker stabbed?" Here the active verb -- stabbed -- applies directly to the merchant banker, so the other party is a whom.
Does that make sense?
Cheers
Jim
so who did it?
Quote from: Dandontdare on 08 March, 2011, 07:25:55 PM
Fewer is for a reduced number of things - "there are fewer students living in this area nowadays".
Less is for a reduced degree of something - "the students around here are less noisy".
To say "there are less students around" is just WRONG!
Got it! I think the thing that confused me was that I usually think of it in terms of money. I suppose money is both an amount of value - and that's how it's usually described - but it's also a number of objects, how many notes etc you have in your pocket. Does that make sense to anyone else but me?
Anyway, I get it now so thanks.
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 08 March, 2011, 07:49:39 PM
Who did what to whom?
"To whom am I speaking?" You are speaking, the person spoken to is a whom.
"Who stabbed the merchant banker?" The who is the stabber; the subject of the verb.
"By whom was the merchant banker stabbed?" Here the active verb -- stabbed -- applies directly to the merchant banker, so the other party is a whom.
Does that make sense?
Yes, that makes sense thanks. The subject is the who - so am I right in thinking that someone may say 'I am someone to whom respect should be given' - the person giving the respect is the who while the person talking is the whom? Apologies if I'm butchering the language.
I may be opening a whole other can of worms here but taking your last example - 'by whom' etc - I would have said 'Who was the merchant banker stabbed by?'. I guess that's just wrong.
Quote from: JamesC on 08 March, 2011, 08:12:44 PM
I usually think of it in terms of money.
And that makes you a
bad person. I read it somewhere. I think it's something Jesus said, but I might be wrong.
;)
Quote from: JamesC on 08 March, 2011, 08:12:44 PM
Yes, that makes sense thanks. The subject is the who - so am I right in thinking that someone may say 'I am someone to whom respect should be given' - the person giving the respect is the who while the person talking is the whom? Apologies if I'm butchering the language.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's right. By the same token, you might ask "Who should I respect?" because, in that sentence, you are the one doing the respecting.
QuoteI may be opening a whole other can of worms here but taking your last example - 'by whom' etc - I would have said 'Who was the merchant banker stabbed by?'. I guess that's just wrong.
A can of worms, indeed! "Stabbed by?" would be ending the sentence with a preposition, a grammatical rule with its origins (I believe) in Latin grammar whose strict observance can lead to sentences becoming irrevocably mangled. A civil servant is supposed to have corrected a memo penned by Winston Churchill in order to eliminate a preposition, to which Churchill is said to have responded:
"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."...Which rather neatly demonstrates the sentence mangling I spoke of.
EDIT: (Or, indeed, "of which I spoke.")
Cheers!
Jim
Quote from: Cthulouis on 08 March, 2011, 07:38:15 PM
Apart from "Because this rule someone once made up has now become tradition," what is the reason for this strict division? Obviously putting fewer into the less sentence makes you sound retarded, but putting less into the fewer sentence is something that people would easily understand. Is there any reason regarding clarity of language that fewer cannot be substituted for less?
What it comes down to is whether or not you care about language, and think language can be well crafted and aesthetically pleasing, or is just a blunt and functional tool necessary for getting things done. Having taught adult education classes in the past, there have been numerous occasions where I've been asked what a word means and when I've told somebody what the word means, they have asked "well, why can't we just say that then, instead of the other word?" What some of my students wanted was to abolish all synonyms because you don't need more than one word for a thing, and do away with long, complicated words that convey very precise and technical meaning, because vague and general but familiar words are sufficient to convey a rough approximation of the meaning.
George Orwell already covered this ground in
Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's called Newspeak. IngSoc says Oldspeak is doubleplus ungood. The English language contains a lot of words we don't need, and it'd be a lot easier all round if there were fewer - sorry, less - expressions we had at our disposal, in order to simplify communication. Of course, George Orwell had a structuralist take on such a philistine development: IngSoc's intention was that with fewer words, and therefore concepts, at their disposal, the governed would be incapable of thoughtcrime because the concepts would not exist for the things they might otherwise be tempted to think seditious thoughts about if they had the words for them.
Bravo, sir.
Cheers!
Jim