Separated by a Common Language

I'm not Ellen, but many people do say that 'whom' is archaic. I still sometimes use it myself. Simple enough - it was used for the object case - "A man whom I knew years ago".

Whom is stilted/archaic except immediately following a preposition, thus:

I know who wants to go. [subject]
I know who you are. [subject complement]
I know whom he loved. [verb object, stilted]
I know who he loved. [verb object]
I know whom you have come from [preposition object, stilted]
I know who you have come from [preposition object]
I know from whom you have come [preposition object]

In short: "I favor whom's doom (except after a preposition)." —William Safire

Hang on! Aren't we supposed to be letting Ellen answer the questions?

Haha! I do not feel proprietary about who answers. (Note: Not "whom answers." And the reason I picked "who" there isn't an aversion to "whom.")

The rule for who/whom is simple, really. Try the sentence with "him" if it sounds wrong, then the correct use is probably "who". If "him" sounds fine, then the correct use is probably "whom".

That "him" rule isn't always so easy to sort out in a sentence, though. Andrew, I don't have strong feelings about your dropping "whom," especially not in certain cases. The thing is, some whom-dropping goes over better than other whom-dropping, and I agree with the spirit of the examples John posted above. Sometimes "whom" is actually kind of weird-sounding, and sometimes it's not. By the way, here are two sentences for people who happen to enjoy "who"/"whom" challenges:
1. To __________ (whoever, whomever) stole my computer, I have reported you to the campus police!
2. Ramona, ________ (who, whom) I think is a pest, was just awarded a prize for good citizenship.

The 'notify me' button (or [BrE} tick box) is there as soon as I start typing a comment

No such button/box here. For a long time I've been using blogtrottr.com to send me notifications instead of wrestling with Google's nonsense. It's much simpler, much more reliable, and there's no need to register.

(Other, similar, services are available!)

Hi Grhm, I just made a Twitter poll about the punctuation of "similar" in such constructions. That's always an interesting one. Here it is in case you'd like to see it: https://twitter.com/GrammarTable/status/1574204296257671169

Ha!

I don't do Twitface, on principle, so I can't respond there, but you asked:

What is the best punctuation for this sentence?
1. Other, similar, options are available.
2. Other, similar options are available.
3. Other similar options are available.

My answer is that it depends what you are trying to say, because they have different meanings:

(1) is saying that there are 2 or more other options available that are similar to the thing in question;

(3) is saying that in addition to the (1 or more) similar options already mentioned, there are (2 or more) other options available that are also similar to the thing.

I can't think of a context where (2) would be appropriate.

However, I do agree with the twitterer who opined that it would have been better simply to have written "Similar options are available".

(Blimey, you have to watch what you say round here!)

I hope you didn't feel picked on! I definitely didn't mean it like that. 😀 And thank you for typing "blimey" in your reply. I never, ever get to see that or hear that around here.

No, I was only joking!
I actually remember that I typed "other similar services..." at first, then realised that wasn't what I meant and so went back and added the commas.
I'm still pondering whether the single comma in sentence (2) makes sense, and if so how it affects the meaning.
I'm curious to hear how you answer your own question!

I think the sentences should eliminate "other"; similar options are by definition other options. The bonus is that it removes the question of comma usage.

Hi LyzzyBee! I absolutely love the difference in treatment of collective nouns. "The family is" versus "the family are," "Manchester is" versus "Manchester are," "Google has announced" versus "Google have announced," and so on. There's variety on both sides of the Atlantic, but you definitely see more plurals in the UK in such cases than you do in the US. I happen to be partial to UK conjugation habits. I enjoy using a nice plural verb with a collective noun from time to time. I sometimes joke that it's my British affectation.

Excellent, thank you! I do spend a lot of time changing "the staff is" to "the staff are" in my localisation work!

😄 People in the US are often appalled by the sight of a plural verb with a collective noun. For example, if I quoted the beginning of the English-language Wikipedia entry on Led Zeppelin ("Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968"), there would be, uh, comments.

The construction is flat/ly ungrammatical in AmE, and produces exactly the same feelings in us as "George Washington were the first U.S. President" would. There is a marginal exception for family: writing "My family live all over the state" works for me, because I'm really saying that the members of my family are scattered when I say the family is (there may be other nouns like this). But I'd still naturally say "My family lives all over the state."

I have doubtless mentioned before that my father (a lawyer) used to say that one should say "The jury is agreed" but "The jury are disagreed", but I don't think he actually did this except as a joke.

But it seems to me that Americans don't hesitate to abandon that 'flatly grammatical' rule just as soon as it gets even slightly troublesome:
This, from Discogs:
"Codeine was a slowcore band from NYC. They formed in 1989 and broke up in 1994."
I feel it should be
"Codeine were a slowcore band from NYC. They formed in 1989 and broke up in 1994."
...but if this rule were actually followed, it would have to be
"Codeine was a slowcore band from NYC. It formed in 1989 and broke up in 1994."
That sounds stilted to me, but at least it's logically consistent.
The actual wording, with its jarring mixture of singular and plural, is just horrible.

Grhm! You are the winner! Please get in touch!

Hi Peter, "it's" for "its" had already had a long and happy life before the internet showed up. I don't know what will happen in the future. I would be ready to adapt to "it's" for the possessive if I lived to be 200 or so and it changed! Some people have trouble switching back and forth between casual textspeak and formal writing, but skilled writers can roll around in the mud and then put on their writing tuxedos. I happen to enjoy all the forms. I often neglect punctuation and capitalization in private texts to friends—especially to the writers! It feels rebellious and playful to me. 😜 But then I turn around and am positively PUNCTILIOUS about the punctuation and other features of my public posts. I'm afraid I can't comment on the larger trends you've asked about. I rely on Lynne for information about trends. 😀 I do take complaints at the Grammar Table, though, and I still remember one junior college instructor in Massachusetts who told me that her students, of all demographics, seemed opposed to capitalization in their papers.

I on the other hand would like to see apostrophes disappear, as in German, and write (with Shaw in The Apple Cart, "One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who havnt and dont". I would also like to see a conservative and dialect-respecting spelling reform like the current proposal from the English Spelling Society. But these things are ponies.

Hmmm, I answered this, but I seem to have forgotten to thread it, and now I can't figure out how to delete the original. I hope you saw my (unthreaded) response, Grhm, but in case you didn't, here it is again: "I can't speak for the larger category of self-styled grammarians, but this has never struck me as a remotely meaningful issue for the well-informed grammar lovers among us. Grammar is about possibilities! It offers variety and beauty! I love beginning with conjunctions. The fact that I didn't begin with one in this response should not be understood as a reproach to fans of the sentence-launching conjunction."

I remember teachers requiring us to answer test or homework questions as full sentences. They said answering a "why" question with a sentence starting with "because" was unacceptable. It was the same with "and" or "but." I think it's a silly rule. I sometimes wrote things like "Because of XYZ, this thing happened" in essays just to be contrary.

Thank you. That is slightly reassuring; but if there is still a substantial body of opinion that (rightly or wrongly) dislikes the practice, then to spare their sensitivities I wonder if it might be best to avoid doing it anyway. I try to avoid gratuitously splitting infinitives for that same reason. I know there's no real grammatical reason not to, but I also know how irritating some people find it. How widespread is the prejudice against sentence-launching conjunctions, would you say?

Oops! That was me! Forgot to put my name in.

I hear you on that, Grhm, but I need my opening conjunctions, so that is one thing I can't compromise on. There are a few things I do give up for that audience-sensitivity reason, but they are not things I care about. Initial coordinating conjunctions ("and" and "but" in particular) are SO common in excellent writing that I do not feel they are a meaningful liability with readers—as long as the writing is good. But those same initial conjunctions in weak writing can make the writing seem worse.

Hi Sigrid! I assume that some portion of the people who DON'T stop at the table are put off by the term, but so far no one has thrown rotten tomatoes at me. There is quite a bit of antipathy here to the term "grammar," but so much of it has to do with the point of view of the person talking about it, and I'm not scolding. Also, once you add the word "table" and have a big dorky sign, people often start laughing, so I think the table component has a softening effect on the grammar component. 😀

Did you grow up in the UK, thekelvingreen? I never see "England are" in the US, but I definitely encounter it in writing in the UK. I am completely used to it and enjoy it, but it sounds totally wrong to most US-based, uh, ears. In the UK you are a lot more likely than in the US to see plural verbs used with collective nouns, which are nouns singular in form but representing multiple people, animals, etc. Pair, family, troup, group, and England in a sports context are all examples that could be matched up with a plural or a singular verb, depending on where you're standing and who is talking. The concept behind choosing the plural is "notional agreement," and you can read about it briefly here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/notional-agreement-subject-verb-principle-proximity. I personally am a huge fan of notional agreement, where meaning trumps form in determing the choice of verb. I wish I were allowed to go with notional agreement more often! People look at you funny if you do it too often in NYC.

Born in England, raised in Wales, spent a couple of years in Minnesota along the way, back in England, all of which may explain my confusion.

Thanks for the link!

My pleasure!

Oh hello, Phil—I know you from Twitter! Thank you for this question. I encounter far more Spanish than French, unsurprisingly—I hear Spanish regularly in my NYC neighborhood and French only rarely. Since first studying these languages in school, I haven't personally experienced the use of masculine forms for mixed groups as a problem or imbalance, but I recognize that other people do. I encounter things like "amig@s" in academic settings, but that usage is not something I have noticed in Spanish encounters in my walking-around-town regular life. I would need to be far more immersed in these languages to be confident I know what's happening around me outside of scholarly and activist circles. I do read the articles, though! 🙂

Yes, I am @philbanting - and thank you for your reply. Although I am in Europe most of my Spanish-speaking connections are with Latin America. I could have mentioned that I once asked a Bolivian female teenager what she thought about the gender balance problem and she said that it was just the way the language worked, but I have seen her own father use the amig@s form in e.g. Facebook posts. Since gender is such a hot-button topic in the English-speaking world I will be interested to see how this develops.

Uh, looking around for a 'Notify Me' option

when entering a comment, it should be a tick-box next to the 'publish' button. You have to do it when publishing the comment, rather than after. Not sure if this works in all interfaces, but it's there for me when I see the webpage on a Mac in Chrome. If it doesn't work for you, it probably doesn't matter, as I know I can contact you through Twitter or your blog!

Hello, A K M Adam. That's a good question. And a big question, one that I wonder about a lot. I have a number of not-fully-formed thoughts on the matter that I am not quite ready to share (sorry!). By the way, I considered pursuing a linguistics major at least twice in college, but each time, after reading course descriptions, I decided to go a different direction. But I didn't experience grammar as a set of restrictions. Childhood prohibitions are powerful and tenacious, but reading widely—and by that I mean across historical periods and across cultures—is a powerful antidote to mistaken beliefs that language is monolithic and static. So is the study of other languages.

I don't think this is a UK-US difference. I don't use this construction in my own writing, but I suspect there was an artistic goal involved in this choice. "Not All Boys Are Blue" sounds a lot more limiting and negative than "All Boys Aren't Blue." In addition, the title kind of makes you sit inside it for a while and roll around in its meaning and its ambiguity. So yes, while I don't use the construction myself, I think the choice served art here. Also, I don't view "All Boys Aren't Blue" as clearly the equivalent of "No Boys Are Blue," but I do find these constructions ambiguous and/or taxing when I see them in, say, workplace writing. I have just made a Twitter poll based on this question, and if you are on Twitter, you can look for it at https://twitter.com/GrammarTable/status/1575701127181762572. In case you aren't on Twitter, I will come back with results. One commenter on my Twitter poll has already cited this example: "All that glitters is not gold." People certainly do seem to accept that (very old) one.

Hmmm but we sometimes hear the construction 'all of them did not answer' when it would have been easier to say 'none of them answered'

Yes, I would naturally understand "all of them did not answer" as "none of them answered", but observation of situational contexts leads me to believe that some people use "all of them did not answer" to mean "only some of them answered", for which I would expect "not all of them answered".

Poll results, with 597 results (and I admit it is not a perfectly constructed poll!):

What does this sentence mean? "All cats are not sly."

A. No cats are sly. 34.5%

B. Some cats aren't sly. 45.9%

C. could be either / depends 16.2%

D. something else / see answers 3.4%

I imagine there is some linguistic work on this, but I personally don't know why—sorry! As a freelance reporter, I used to have real trouble with this very thing, and I know I had plenty of company. I would sometimes end up on a long and annoying internet hunt trying to figure out a particular organization's preference, and then there would be inconsistency on their website, and in news stories, and in public use. In fact, I've had a client for almost 20 years whose name is regularly abbreviated, and I STILL have to look up about once a year whether I need an article with it or not. I simply cannot remember. I'll ask Lynne and others on Twitter whether they know of research on this topic. I have some half-baked thoughts and impressions, but we might as well go straight to a useful source.

Wow, these are some tough "why" questions on your website, Lynne Murphy! 😀

Wisob, I confess I have never paid much attention to those adjective-ordering principles. It hurts my head to think about my English adjective habits in that way, and I will leave the why of it to linguists. Even when I approach a new language and learn its various adjective patterns (do the adjectives go before or after the noun, do they show gender and number, how many cases do I need to learn, does an adjective mean something different if it comes before the noun than it does when it comes after, and so on), I just try to understand instinctively what the patterns are and develop a feeling for them. We have all kinds of cool patterns in the currents of our words, most of which most of us don't think about very much. I enjoy the whirling around more than I enjoy accounting for the whirling. I apologize for my deficiencies. 😀 Now let's go swimming!

There's a lot of individual variation in river names even in England. Most of the rivers (per Wikipedia's list) are "River X", but there are the Clough River, the Brennand River, the Whitendale River, the Little Avon River, the Mells River, the Little River, the Oldbridge River, the Whitelake River, the Huntspill River, the Sowy River, the list goes on. The River Wriggle is also known as the Wriggle River. Most of these are either tributaries or what Wikipedia calls "minor coastal catchments", but there are plenty of rivers of similar size and status that are the River X.

The American spiritual "One More River" has a line "There's one more river, and that's the river of Jordan", but I don't know any other cases like that. However, in Michigan we have the River Raisin and in Ontario the Raisin River, both named "la riviére des Raisins" by the original French Canadian settlers.

Dru, Jordan River sounds weird to my US-manufactured ears. I would instinctively go with River Jordan if I had to use both words in the name.

As for your larger flowing-water-naming question, what we need right now is a toponymist specializing in rivers. I am not that, but I am certainly aware of inconsistencies with geographic names and have had to deal with them as a writer/editor. One example is "on" versus "in" before the names of islands—and though that may seem obvious, the principles and practices for which preposition to use are almost always more complicated than people think. As a nontoponymist who has had to refer to rivers in multiple languages, I would guess there are diverse linguistic influences and histories affecting some of these river-naming choices and word-order habits, but I do not have the detailed knowledge I would need to answer responsibly.

Thank you for your river examples, John Cowan. I especially enjoyed the River Wriggle / Wriggle River.

Now back to your second question, Dru. I am a big fan of avoiding "he or she," which was always so awkward, so I am relieved about that pronoun development. Some people I know use "themself." I haven't yet, but I probably will. I do think it serves a need, and I assume it will feel more natural with time.

Hello, Michael! As always, it is lovely to see you online, and thank you for your generous words. My top two favorites are (1) plural verbs with collective nouns (as discussed above, so I'm sorry I can't be more original, but it's the truth) and (2) more opportunities to put my punctuation outside my quotation marks. I request the opportunity to visit so I can add to the list. (P.S. I generally love listening to Irish English, but I don't get enough exposure.)

My father is a biochemist. I appreciate biochemists. Did you know we say "persnickety" over here? "Pernickety" sounds weird though 100% charming to my ear. I enjoy that variety.

Regarding your "Albert and Eric's mother" example, I understand your point. I do feel I can understand the phrase based on convention (i.e., it's just how it is done) and contextual clues. Lately I have been contemplating the rigidity of the prescription, though. It seems random. I have just posted a poll on it and can report back if you like, or you can view the results here: https://twitter.com/GrammarTable/status/1576397247708659712.

Regarding your second point, this is what I would do, without question:
1. This is a book WHOSE aim is the untangling of a common language. ("Whose" can be used for objects. People complain about it, but that opposition is grounded in superstition and not actual usage. I am passionate about this point. Terrible writing sins are committed in an effort to avoid "whose" with objects. I object!)
2. Buy this book, WHICH will help to answer your questions. (I couldn't use "that" after a comma there. This which-clause is what is described—confusingly and tongue-trippingly—as a nonrestrictive relative clause.)

Gosh! Thank you for that!