Who/Whom

My scanner met a terrible end a few months ago, and I haven't purchased another. I used my webcam to capture these images. My apologies for the poor image quality. These advertisements each have a mistake in the use of who where whom should have been used. Who is a subject pronoun. Whom is an object pronoun. When working with questions, it is often easier to re-order the words into a declarative sentence. For example, "Who will you get your flu shot for?" could be re-written, "You will get your flu shot for who." In the rewriting, I think it is easier to see that who is working as an object of the preposition FOR; therefore, the writer should have used the objective form, which is WHOM. The first ad should read, "For whom will you get your flu shot?" In the second advertisement, "Who will you meet at Tech?" should be re-worded to say, "You will meet who at Tech." In this sentence, who is working as a direct object; therefore the objective pronoun whom is needed.

A trick that I sometimes teach my students is to substitute another subject/object pronoun pair in the place of who/whom. For example, they/them. For most people, "You will get your flu shot for they/them" is a simple choice. Most people would choose them, the object pronoun; therefore, since whom is also an object pronoun, whom is the correct choice.**Oddly, in the previous sentence, whom is being used as a subject.

I know that most people don't care one way or another about the who/whom dilemma. The argument usually revolves around the idea that meaning is the most important part of communication, and if the reader understands either who or whom in a given sentence, it doesn't matter which word is used. Indeed, that is a slippery slope.

Honestly, I believe that in a few generations whom will have gone the way of thee and thou.

**I typed this quickly and while tired and sick, so correct my grammar here. It is only fair. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.