Mind your language
The word whom, as we have all noticed, is dead on its feet. The proof is that we don't know when to use it. Of course, as wellbrought-up Spectator readers, we know in theory. But it does not come naturally to the tongue in every circumstance of extempore speech. It is like the second person singular simple past tense of think, a bit tricky, because obsolescent. Here's a good old example from Trollope, not from He Knew He Was Right, which is in the shops because of the telly, but from 77w Eustace Diamonds, published in 1873. The speaker is a countess, and if a countess can't speak English, what chance have mere baronesses and common women? Lady Linlithgow, the countess in question, was thought to resemble the Duchess in Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (1865). Anyway, the goodnatured Lady Fawn says to the countess, 'Miss Morris thinks it right that you should be told that she's engaged lobe married.' 'Who to?' demanded the countess.
If Lady Linlithgow had been educated in a board-school she might have said 'To whom?', as the grammar books laid down. But it is precisely in these interrogative rejoinders that we place the preposition last. In a parallel response to someone announcing they are going away, the formula would he 'Where to?' When was the last date upon which it would have sounded natural instead to have replied, 'Whither?'
But who needs the Victorian aristocracy (as fictively realised by a civil servant) to sow doubt when we have the Authorised Version of the Bible? King James's committee in translating Matthew xv: 16 came up with, 'But whom say ye that I am?' (Ye is the nominative plural version of you; we've dropped that distinction.) It should be who, not whom. Think of an indicative equivalent: 'Ye say who I am.'
The interrogative was the first place for the who/whom distinction to break down. Shakespeare has the same problem. In King Lear, Edgar asks, 'To who, my Lord?' Here the Authorised Version gets it right: 'Peter said, Lord to whom shall we go?' (John vi:68).
The fact is that nothing is going to stop us now from saying, 'Who did she meet at the theatre?' And that version of things is going to be written down in direct speech in novels or newspapers. But we are in the awkward stage of history, jellified by the printed text, in which we often have to think twice. Fewer and fewer people know what's what when it comes to who's who.
Dot Wordsworth
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