Sad, but Correct Grammar
This is from a news story about a traffic accident.
It was driven by 44-year-old Catina Isaacs, who state police said died in the crash.
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/traffic/2018/09/13/off-duty-dover-officer-sparked-fatal-five-car-crash-dover/1296270002/
If you read this blog with any regularity, you might expect me to say that “who” should be “whom,” but the sentence is correct!
Look for the verb. We have two of them, “said” and “died.” Now look for the subjects. “Police said” is obvious. Now what’s the subject of “died”? It’s “who died”! Not “whom died.” So the nominative form of the personal pronoun is correct.
My condolences to the family.
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The Bratty Kid Gets it Right
One of my favorite hobby horses—getting “whom” correct.
Subordinate clauses are stumbling blocks for a lot of people because these clauses often put the direct object first, where the subject usually goes. So the nominative form, “who” gets used, even though the actual subject is “you.”
Whenever you have a who/whom decision to make, first decide what is the verb, then look for the subject. Then decide whether the “who” word is the subject or the object. “Who” is a subject, “whom” is an object.
Who and That
Here’s the rule: “Who” refers to people, “that” refers to everything else. So you say,
The person who sits next to me stinks.
Not
The person that sits next to me stinks.
Okay, maybe you shouldn’t say either sentence, but you get the idea.
I ran into an exception that works. Maybe we could call this personification. After all, aren’t dogs really people?
Besides, Mike Peterson, of Comic Strip of the Day is a dog person, so maybe that’s a good excuse, too.
PS—Unrelated bonus article: I don’t do politics here, but this appeared yesterday in The Washington Post and it’s about an English teacher correcting someone’s writing. I guess I gotta be proud.
A Tricky Grammar Construction
Regular readers (all three of you) know that I mention “whom” a lot. —Because a lot of people get it wrong, harrumpf.
Today I offer a vote against “whom”!
Review: Use “whom” when you have an object. Think of the stuffy
To whom it may concern
That’s correct. “Whom” is the object of the preposition.
And you use “who” when you have a subject. I remember my mom saying
WHO DID THIS???
I won’t go into details about the event, but her grammar was correct. “Who” is the subject.
Now for something tricky. First, the rule:
When you parse (analyse) a sentence, go from the inside out.
Here’s the tricky sentence, from Bloomberg:
No one said no to JPMorgan, or to whomever at Palantir volunteered to help Cambridge Analytica—or to another organization keenly interested in state-of-the-art data science, the Los Angeles Police Department.
(Whom, whomever, same thing.) “Whomever” comes after “to,” so it’s an object, right? No!
The rule, remember, is to work from the inside out, and “whomever” is actually the subject of the clause “x at Palantir volunteered…”
The whole noun clause is the object of “to,” and “whoever” is the proper subject of the clause. It’s “whoever volunteered.”
Pat yourself on the back if you got that. This is the kind of construction that separates the men from the boys. Or maybe I should say the professionals from the amateurs.
A Little Tech Writing Advice
This Lunar Baboon comic is a set of instructions. Instructions are common in technical writing.
Look at the second panel. He numbered the instruction. That’s good. But…
He used the future tense! The context of instructions is customary behavior, and for customary behavior, use the present tense, even if it hasn’t happened yet. Instructions should also be in the imperative, so he really should have said, “First, get a wand.” (The first panel describes a single event, so the future is okay here.)
The rest is good, but I have a quibble. In the next-to-last panel he should have said, “…someone who enjoys…” but that’s for another lesson.
