| 词组 | who, whom |
| 释义 | who, whom 1. It may seem that the use of these interrogative and relative pronouns should be simple enough: who is the nominative ("Who is it?") and whom is the objective ("the man whom we had met"). As is generally recognized, however, there is a certain disparity between the way who and whom are supposed to be used and the way they are actually used. Let us begin with a little lesson in Shakespeare. • LAUNCE. Can nothing speak? Master, shall I strike? PROTEUS. Who wouldst thou strike? L AUNCE. Nothing.—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1595 • BOYET. Now, madam, summon up your dearest spirits. Consider who the King your father sends, To whom he sends, and what's his embassy—Love's Labour's Lost, 1595 • MACBETH.... For certain friends that are both his and mine, Whose loves I may not drop, but wail his fall Who I myself struck down.—Macbeth, 1606 • ALBANY. Run, run, O, run! EDGAR. TO who, my lord? Who has the office? —King Lear, 1606 • POLONIUS.... I'll speak to him again.—What do you read, my lord? HAMLET. Words, words, words. POLONIUS. What is the matter, my lord? HAMLET. Between who? POLONIUS. I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.—Hamlet, 1601 • IAGO. Not this hour, Lieutenant; 'tis not yet ten o'th'clock. Our general cast us thus early for the love of his Desdemona; who let us not therefore blame.—Othello, 1605 These examples have been chosen to show that Shakespeare was not at all averse to using who in places where the strict grammarians—who were still a century and a half away when Shakespeare wrote—would prescribe whom. They show, in addition, that he sometimes used both who and whom in the fashion later to be prescribed. Shakespeare's use does not in fact appear to be substantially different from present-day use; who for whom is most usual at the beginning of an utterance ("Who wouldst thou strike?"), but it sometimes occurs after a preposition or verb ("To who, my lord?"). And it should be noted that most of the speakers represented here are from the upper orders of society; these speakers are not louts or clowns. Nor was Shakespeare an innovator with these uses. Flesch 1983 notes that who had been substituted for whom in constructions like these as far back as the 14th century. The anomaly of finding both who and whom used for objective functions did not escape the attention of the 18th-century grammarians. Lowth 1762 came out foursquare for strict construction, insisting on (for example) "Whom is this for?" rather than "Who is this for?" Only the considerable prestige of Milton's Paradise Lost dented Lowth's orthodoxy; he allowed than whom as an exception (see than 1 ). Priestley, at least as early as the 1769 edition cited by Leonard 1929, disagreed with Lowth, favoring "Who is this for?" as the more natural way of speaking. Leonard mentions several other grammarians of the age, each disagreeing with one point or another urged by some other grammarian, or introducing some new analogy. Noah Webster managed to write himself, through successive editions and works, from Lowth's position around to Priestley's. The 19th-century grammarians seem not to have added anything of substance to the dispute. But Richard Grant White 1870 did sound a new note when he predicted the demise of whom: One of the pronoun cases is visibly disappearing — the objective case whom. Since White's solemn pronouncement, quite a few commentators have made the same observation. Here is a sampling: • Whom is fast vanishing from Standard American — Mencken, The American Language, 1936 • If... we lose the accusative case whom—and we are in great danger of losing it —Simon 1980 • Whom is dying out in England, where "Whom did you see?" sounds affected —Anthony Burgess, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 20 July 1980 The first question that needs to be asked, then, is whether whom is truly in danger of disappearing. The answer depends on where you look and listen. Whom seems to be rare in ordinary speech, which is what Mencken and Burgess were paying attention to. But it does not seem to be disappearing from written English. It is worth pointing out, though we will not take the space to illustrate at length, that the Merriam-Webster files are rich in examples of the prescribed uses of whom. Beyond that, persistence of whom in constructions such as "a person whom everybody admits is successful"— where in fact normative grammar prescribes who—gave Fowler 1926 considerable concern. He found an abundance of evidence in British newspapers and feared the use might become a "sturdy indefensible." Dwight L. Bolinger voiced the same fear: • Yet recent instances in print seem to show that this ultra-correct use of whom is increasing, and that it may, alas, establish itself some day just as than whom even now compels acceptance — Words, September 1941 Bryant 1962 devotes some space to these constructions, which she calls "hypercorrect" and in which she says whom is "mistakenly" used as the subject. Jespersen 1909-49 (vol. 3) has a fairly long treatment of the "hypercorrect" whom. After discussing Fowler's interpretation, he goes on to list a large number of examples and to examine in some detail the reasons for the use of whom. His judgment is quite the opposite of Fowler's; he concludes that whom is natural and correct in such constructions and that who represents either the historical trend of avoiding whom or is the result of schoolmastering. It is distinctly possible, then, that subject whom need not be hypercorrect. Let us return to Shakespeare, before hypercorrectness or even simple correctness was a concern, for some examples: • PROSPERO.... They now are in my pow'r; And in these fits I leave them, while I visit Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drown'd, And his and mine lov'd darling.—The Tempest, 1612 • TIMON.... Spare not the babe Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy. • Think it a bastard whom the oracle • Hath doubtfully pronounc'd thy throat shall cut, • And mince it sans remorse.—Timon of Athens, 1608 • BASTARD.... And others more, going to seek the grave • Of Arthur, whom they say is kill'd to-night On your suggestion.—King John, 1597 • HELENA.... But such a one, thy vassal, whom I know • Is free for me to ask, thee to bestow.—All's Well That Ends Well, 1603 • ELBOW. My wife, sir, whom I detest before heaven and your honour • ESCALUS. How? thy wife? • ELBOW. Ay, sir; whom I thank heaven is an honest woman.—Measure for Measure, 1605 Here we find the "hypercorrect" construction a century and a half before Bishop Lowth prescribes what is correct. The grammatical point at issue can be illustrated by Elbow's two whoms. In the first, "My wife ... whom I detest," the relative pronoun is the object of I detest. But in "... whom I thank heaven is an honest woman," the I thank heaven is parenthetical, and the relative is actually the subject of is an honest woman. The two constructions are otherwise similar, however, and whom has been produced for both. According to Jespersen, it is something about the tightness of such constructions that elicits whom. When the parenthetical insertion is clearly set off by a pause or a pause is indicated by punctuation, who then becomes much more likely than whom. Jespersen has numerous examples, of which we append two here: • MARK ANTONY.... I should do Brutus wrong, and • Cassius wrong, Who, you all know, are honourable men.—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1600 • There was one H , who, I learned in after days, was seen expiating some maturer offence in the hulks —Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, 1823 When who is affixed without pause to the parenthetical insertion, Jespersen calls on the historical trend away from whom and the effect of schoolmastering for explanation. Again he provides examples, including Fielding, from before schoolmastering, and Dickens, after school-mastering. He also notes that some writers have used both who and whom as subject—Benjamin Franklin and James Boswell among them. To repeat, our evidence shows that present-day uses of who and whom are in kind just about the same as they were in Shakespeare's day. What sets us apart from Shakespeare is greater self-consciousness: the 18th-cen-tury grammarians have intervened and given us two sets of critics to watch our whos and whoms—the strict constructionists following Lowth and the loose constructionists following Priestley and the later Webster. Self-consciousness turns up at least as early as Dickens: • 'Think of who?' inquired Mrs. Squeers; who (as she often remarked) was no grammarian, thank God —Nicholas Nickleby, 1839 And later: • "It's not what you know," we say, "but who you know." And I don't mean "whom." —W. Allen, Western Folklore, January 1954 • "By whom?" I said. When I was serious my English was good —Robert B. Parker, The Widening Gyre, 1983 And sometimes self-consciousness becomes an unfortunate self-doubt: • Mr. Beeston said he was asked to step down, although it is not known exactly who or whom asked him —Redding (Conn.) Pilot, in New Yorker, 31 May 1982 But this greater self-consciousness appears to have changed actual usage very little. The following examples show just about the same kinds of uses found in Shakespeare: • I should like to help him, but hardly know who to apply to —Henry Adams, letter, 8 Nov. 1859 • They become leaders. It doesn't matter who they lead —Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 1935 • And he said, Well, haven't you got any opinion at all about them? and I said, About who? —William Faulkner, 18 May 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 • ... which social group we identify with ..., and who we are talking to —Margaret Shaklee, in Shopen & Williams 1980 • So who would they surprise? —Ken Donelson, English Jour., November 1982 • ... his three cousins from Minneapolis ... who he left because he was nervous being around them — Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, 1985 • Let tomorrow's people decide who they want to be their President —William Safire, N.Y. Times Mag., II Oct. 1987 • ... a very timid but forthright recruit whom he hoped would prove to be a crack salesman —Bennett Cerf, This Week Mag., 19 July 1953 • Colombo, 48 years old, whom law enforcement officials have said is the head of a Mafia family in Brooklyn —N.Y. Times, 5 July 1971 • "My roommate and I sat up half the night talking about it," said one student, whom, I suspect, has never before read anything he wasn't forced to — John Medelman, Esquire, January 1974 (this whom is contrary to Jespersen's theory.) • In preparing to make a speech, the speaker gives some thought to whom his audience is —Linda Cos-tigan Lederman, New Dimensions, 1977 • ... the Blair family, whom Safire says were the Kennedys of their time —Trish Todd, Publishers Weekly, 29 May 1987 All that remains to be said is that objective who and nominative whom are much less commonly met in print than nominative who and objective whom. In speech, you rarely need to worry about either one. In writing, however, you may choose to be a bit more punctilious, unless you are writing loose and easy, speechlike prose. Our files show that objective whom is in no danger of extinction, at least in writing. 2. For a discussion of who (whom), that, and which in reference to persons or things, see that 2. |
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