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I'm a doctor and I have a wonderful friend who is a doctor also. He and I have similar philosophies about our obligation to our patients. He ends each of his emails with the following:
"There are some patients whom we cannot cure, but there are none we cannot help, cannot comfort, and none that we cannot harm."
I'm pretty sure that the word “whom†here should be “whoâ€. Can you please give me some help? Actually, if it were me, I'd use “thatâ€. I don't want to say anything to him until I am sure. He has a blog that hundreds of people read and if I am right, I know that many others see this aside from me. He is so prestigious in the medical community so maybe that is why no one else has told him about it. OTOH maybe I'm wrong.
I agree that there are some cases in which the correct use of whom is hypercorrect, in the sense that it sounds awkward and stilted. But I don't think that is the case here. In that sentence whom is correct, and it sounds fine. There are various methods that help determine correct usage, though I will admit that sometimes it just sounds better to be wrong! To my ears, the doctor's statement sounds better using the correct form, whom. The whole statement is a bit of a tongue twister, though, so I'm glad he concludes his emails with it rather than his phone calls!
Regarding whom being a modern day affectation, I'll go along with that when him and them are also considered affectations. 🙂
For Who The Bell Tolls . . .
"Whom" is correct, and sounds OK to me in the lofty proverbial tone of the quote you mention -- contributing a sense of importance or trust -- so I affirm semaphore's opinions in this regard. In most daily speech and writing, however, it sounds pretentious to me. I find there are usually very simple ways to bring the tone back down from the mountaintop: when others might use "To whom it may concern" to open an e-mail at work, I open with "To all concerned." It seems to be catching on here.
I had this issue on my mind this morning because of this sentence from a column written by the editorial page editor of my hometown's newspaper (The San Angelo Sub-standard Times):
"Often, the silent victims are children, many whom have watched someone who was supposed to love their mother instead beat or kill her."
(Here's the full column: http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2009/mar/17/ty-meighan-case-highlights-domestic-violence/)
It seems to me that this could be fixed pretty easily by adding an "of" before whom, which would make it the object of a preposition (I wonder if the writer accidentally left out an "of"), but it would still sound a little awkward and stilted to me.
I use "whom" in speech and writing occasionally, but it's usually when I feel like being a little bit whimsical. The first piece of advice I would give to people who want to use "whom" would be, to paraphrase slightly something I once heard the novelist Tim O' Brien say, "if you don't know how to use the damn word, don't use it in the first place!" The second piece of advice I would give would be to think of it as analogous to "him" or "her" (that's probably a good way of explaining it to most people without getting into the issue of subjective and objective case).
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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