Whom Goes There?

May 4, 2010
By Philip B. Corbett

Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. (Some frequently asked questions are here.)

We try, but we still haven’t quite mastered the whole who/whom situation.

At the risk of stating the obvious yet again, “who” is used as the subject of a relative clause; “whom” is used for an object.

For many speakers and writers, the common mistake is using “who” as an object, when traditional usage calls for “whom”: “I told her who I had invited.” Since this colloquial use of “who” is common in speech, it tends to slip into writing as well.

But for us, it seems that the opposite error is just as common — using “whom” when “who” is correct. This often occurs when an intervening attribution phrase throws us off track, or when the relative pronoun follows a preposition. Some recent examples, with help from a careful reader: ...

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Who should I give the keys to? To whom should I give the keys?

The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain

In "The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain." Tara Parker-Rope, begins,

After we hit 40, many of us begin to worry about our aging brains. Will we spend our middle years searching for car keys and forgetting names?

Parker-Rope then asks the book's author, Barbara Strach, several questions, among them:

Q. So what’s the bad news about the middle-aged brain?

Q. So what kinds of things does a middle-aged brain do better than a younger brain?

Q. What about activities like learning to play an instrument or learning a foreign language?

Q. What was the most surprising thing you learned about the middle-aged brain?

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