Education These Here Now Days

[substitute]

My friend D, who is 16 and in high school, had a grammatical question for her teachers the other day.

She wanted to know the difference between "who" and "whom". She asked multiple (more than two) English teachers, none of whom gave her an answer. None of them knew or remembered. My favorite answer was (paraphrased): "No one uses whom any more. It doesn't matter."

This is going to be best colony of the Chinese Empire ever!

Comments

Re: I is good at speling and grammars

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

*Does* it matter? I mean, I hear a lot of gnashing of teeth over the prospect of losing "whom", but strangely no one seems to miss "whence". And you just plain sound stupid if you say "It is I".

I'd rather we regroup and focus our energy on the distinction between adjectives and adverbs.

Re: I is good at speling and grammars

[substitute.livejournal.com]

It matters in that 1) If you don't know the difference between the subject and the object you're going to sound like a freakin' idiot to the English-speaking world and 2) Whether it matters or not, a teacher of high school English should be able to answer that question without blinking.

This is true.

[redmaenad.livejournal.com]

There's a song that I love by the Old '97s that misuses "whom" during the chorus and I wince every time that line comes up. It just sounds horribly wrong. Because it is wrong. And it ruined a really fabulous song. Argh.

In a very small way, I lost respect for a band I love over an object pronoun. It does make a difference.

It's fine to use colloquialisms like "it's me" in writing, if your intention is to sound (read) like you are speaking. But using "whom" instead of "who" is wrong, whether you are speaking or writing. If shit like that is alllowed to be passed off as a colloquialism, then I'm dumping this crappy excuse for a lingua franca and moving on to one that cares.

Re: This is true.

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

"It is I" is prescribed english (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000777.html), via an improper analogy to Latin.

The fact that the teacher's didn't grok the who/whom distinction doesn't bother me so much. Whom is an obsolete form. It's a symptom of how teachers have lost connection with a traditional curriculum, but it's not in itself all that terrible.

My real problem: I was a volunteer tutor for a while, in an afterschool program run by professional teachers, and I was the only person who could understand a line of Shakespeare.

Ditto on what Torgo said, but I don't blame the teachers. They're nice people who like kids and have (fewer options|greater stamina) to deal with the ridiculous school systems we have. I blame the system for not making better teachers or providing the environment that would attract better talent.