a major problem, solved.

[halogenembrace]

Background information: “Who” and whoever” are subjective pronouns; “whom” and “whomever” are in the objective case. As simple and important as that distinction is, many people have difficulty deciding on the proper usage of “who” and “whom” in sentences

Comments

[ydfyce]

This should be no suprised that I already knew this...

*replaces monocle and drives of in all-metal hod-dog roadster*

[halogenembrace]

ooooooooooh right...that's why your away message was wrong enough to inspire me to post this?

[ydfyce]

right... cuz knowing something completely precludes the possibilty that you might not make use of that knowledge at any point in the future... Not that I even remeber what my away message was to argue with you about its grammatical correctness... As evidenced by you lack of use of capital letters and spelling in your comment... Thanks :oP~

[halogenembrace]

*blink* MY spelling?

oh, darling...look at your own comment...you had an impressive THREE errors on a single WORD, but i didn't point those out.

with respect to capital letters, of course i wouldn't use them. they're a tool of oppression. haven't i told you this?

[liveandletlivef]

head.....spinning...

[dagidham]

I have trouble understanding this explanation.

(1) "The men, four of whom are ill, were indicted for fraud."
How do rules 1 and 2 show that (1) needs "whom" and not "who"? I hear "whom" as the best but don't see how the rules show it.

[halogenembrace]

personally, i use an extrapolation of rule one: them/they instead of him/he. you can say "four of them were ill", but not "four of they were ill".

[dagidham]

So, reformulated, rule 1 is:
"he,she,they" --> "who"
"him,her,them" --> "whom"

Seems right. I don't know why they didn't include that in their original formulation of rule 1. Maybe it's obvious-- it seems obvious. But the ommission makes me wonder if there's an arcane reason why both heuristics for sorting "who" from "whom"-- ["he,she", "him,her"] and ["they,them"]--don't have coextensive use.

It seems like rule 1 can expand more. The authors mentioned that "proper name" --> "who". So a 2nd reformulation of rule 1 would be:
"he,she,they,proper name" --> "who"
"him,her,them" --> "whom"

That asymmetry makes me wonder if there's a parallel between the "who" heuristic and the "whom" heuristic. Something like this possible 3rd reformulation:
"he,she,they,proper name" --> "who"
"him, her, them, _______" --> "whom".

If that's right, it would be a big improvement on the original ["he,she", "him",her"] formulation of rule 1.

Do you think anything goes in the blank?

[halogenembrace]

if anything were to go there, it might be ProperName...like "they gave him the book/they gave (implied: to) Richard the book", or "he sent the package to her/he sent the package (explicit: to) Alice"...ahh, well i guess where there is an explicit or implicit preposition for the proper name, there is one for the standard objective pronoun as well...but we might want to highlight its existence anyway to differentiate from the subjective proper name.