Governing Whom

To keep our technical skills sharp, let’s look at a sentence which presents a second-order grammatical question. We know that every preposition has an object, and when that object is a pronoun, it often assumes a unique form, because some pronouns vary their spelling to indicate their grammatical function. This change in spelling (or position) is called inflection, and the conceptual scheme that organizes inflection with nouns and pronouns is called case. English has three cases, nominative, possessive, and objective, and prepositions are said to govern the objective case.

The objective form of the personal pronoun I is me, and the objective form of he is him. So if I wanted to construct a phrase beginning with the preposition between, I would have to write between him and me (not between he and I), because between as a preposition must have its object (here there are two) in the objective case form. Despite the number of times we might read or here between he and I, this rule of prepositions requiring the objective case remains unconquered even in contemporary English.

And so too with the relative pronouns who and whom. There is no mysterious difference between these two words; whom is simply the objective case of who, and so if this pronoun stands as an object of a preposition, it too must appear in its objective form: the person for whom I was working at the time had been quite successful. Here, the preposition for has the relative pronoun as its object, and therefore, in more formal writing at least, we must employ the objective case, whom. Contemporary usage is not quite as strict with who and whom. Much will depend on the degree of formality required for the setting, and determining that requires a sense of discernment—all of which makes the study of grammar more than a merely mechanical application of imperious regulations.

Now, though, comes the second-order problem. What do we do when the object of a preposition is not a word or phrase, but a clause? For example, in the sentence when I heard the news, I worried about who would be fired, shouldn’t the preposition about require the objective whom, not who? In fact, who is correct here because the object of the preposition is not the relative pronoun, but the entire clause which the relative pronoun is beginning. Who is the form we use to represent the subject of a clause, so here the verb phrase would be fired needs that pronoun to indicate its subject. That need trumps the government (again, the traditional terminology) of the preposition, and though there is no way to show the inflection of the clause as the object of about, we must conclude that by inference.

The grammatical analysis we’ve just survived shows how important theory is to practice. An old and venerated college text on logic entitled An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, by Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel and published in 1934, makes an important observation about the study of logic which applies in full measure to the allied study of grammar:

A theoretical science is the basis of any rational technique…. Actual attainment of truth depends, of course, upon individual skill and habit, but a careful study of logical principles helps us to form and perfect techniques for procuring and weighing evidence.

The science of any study is the theory upon which its practice is based. We might think of that science as only a collection of rules arbitrarily imposed, but that is not the case. There is a distinction to be made between rules and regulations: rules arise from within the nature of a subject, regulations are imposed from without. Curiously, the noun rule derives from a Latin verb meaning to direct, and that is all we should want and need to learn from the rules of both grammar and logic: how to proceed in orderly government without confusion. From there we can each undertake the thinking on our own.

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