Ó hAoḋa

To Whom (or Who?) It May Concern

Introduction §

First of all, I’m not trying to tell you how to speak; how you speak is entirely up to yourself. Second of all, I’m not advising you on how to be pedantic and “correct” people who didn’t ask for correction over minor grammatical matters; if you understood their meaning, there’s no need to be rude in a sad attempt to one-up them. The purpose of this blog post is firstly to explain when it is correct to use the word whom instead of who for those looking to inject a little formal precision into their speech, and why sometimes whom sounds wrong even when it ought to be correct.

“Who” versus “Whom” §

I won’t spend too much metaphorical ink here going into detail on the difference between who and whom, as this has been explained countless times by countless people before me, and you could likely find a better definition by googling. In modern usage, for better or for worse, who is invariably considered to be correct under all circumstances, so it’s a good bet to stick with if you’re unsure, and you look sillier using whom when you should’ve used who than using who when you should use whom¹. Furthermore, whom can be jarring or viewed as pretentious by some audiences, so you ought to consider the context of your usage carefully.

The difference between the words comes down to the fact that who is the interrogative pronoun for the subject of a sentence and whom is the interrogative pronoun for the object of a sentence:

• The object of a sentence is the actor or doer in the sentence; it is the person who performs an action in the sentence. The interrogative pronoun for the object of a sentence is who.
• The subject of a sentence is the recipient of the object’s action; it is the person to whom the action in the sentence is performed. The interrogative pronoun for the subject of a sentence is whom.

In my opinion, the easiest way to decide which is correct to use in a sentence is by asking yourself whether the interrogative pronoun acts as a stand-in for the word he or the word him: if it’s a stand-in for he, you should use who and if it’s a stand-in for him you should use whom. I remember this as who sounds most like he and whom sounds most like him.

I’ve Swapped Who for Whom: Why Does it Still Sound Wrong? §

Something that confused me greatly when I first learned the difference between who and whom was the fact that some sentences sounded even less correct after swapping out who for whom than they did before. I initially chalked this up to the word sounding jarring or unnatural due to its declining popularity, but this couldn’t have been the case because whom usually sounded more natural to me. Examples of sentences which sounded less correct to me after swapping who for whom include:

• Who did you give the gift to? → Whom did you give the gift to?
• Who did you meet with? → Whom did you meet with?
• Who did you do that for? → Whom did you do that for?

I eventually realised why these sentences sounded so wrong to me despite seemingly being more technically correct: they end with a preposition.

Dangling Prepositions §

Ending a sentence with a preposition (a word that indicates the relationship between a noun and another part of the sentence, such as to, with, for) is typically discouraged in formal English. While it is not generally considered to be incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition, a sentence typically sounds more “proper” if dangling prepositions are avoided. For example, contrast the sentences “What did you do that for?” and “For what reason did you do that?”: both sentences are perfectly valid, but the latter has a more formal air to it. From around the 18^th century through to the 20^th century, the belief was generally held that it is always incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition in English, which greatly exacerbated the effect of dangling prepositions sounding less proper; in the present day, however, you would be hard-pressed to find an academic who holds this belief, and it’s generally considered absolutely fine to end sentences with prepositions whenever one sees fit.

I believe that the reason why those sentences in which who was replaced with whom suddenly sounded more incorrect above is the mixing of levels of formality: on the one hand, the speaker is being unusually formal using the word whom but on the other hand they are not speaking in the traditionally formal way of avoiding dangling prepositions, resulting in the sentence falling into a sort of “uncanny valley” that makes it sound even less correct. Therefore, I would recommend that you avoid dangling prepositions in the event that you decide to make use of the word whom, as it can make the whole sentence sound off. The previously given example sentences can be modified to sound more correct by re-arranging them to avoid dangling prepositions:

• Who did you give the gift to? → Whom did you give the gift to? → To whom did you give the gift?
• Who did you meet with? → Whom did you meet with? → With whom did you meet?
• Who did you do that for? → Whom did you do that for? → For whom did you do that?

Afterword §

I originally thought that it would be amusing to title this blogpost using a regular expression to represent the optional presence of the letter m in the sentence “To Whom It May Concern”, that is: “To /Whom?/ it May Concern”. I decided against this, however, primarily because I didn’t think it looked as cool as I imagined it would when the idea first occurred to me, as it’s really quite a boring regular expression. Furthermore, the relative simplicity of the regular expression made it so that it was not immediately recognisable as “code” to a one unfamiliar with regular expressions, and thus could lead to confusion: it may just appear that I included a question mark to indicate confusion, or perhaps someone may have imagined that the text with the forward slashes denoted a pronunciation written in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the question mark to indicate a glottal stop. Nevertheless, even though I thought that idea unsuitable for the title of the post, I thought that it was just barely interesting enough to make it worth mentioning in the afterword of this post.