One of my favorite T-shirts proclaims I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you. When people see it, I watch their lips moving as they read it and think about it. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes. Some people don’t get it. What’s not to get? I think it’s the “about whom.” People are haunted by junior high and the English class they sat in and sort of paid attention in, and reading my T-shirt they think about the rules they didn’t quite learn.
One of those rules was the whom rule. The first thing ya gotta know (and Mrs. Eighth-Grade English Teacher may not have known) is that English grammar was more or less invented in the 18 th century. That’s the era of Dr. Johnson, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, John Gay, Laurence Sterne, and John Dryden (well, not quite; he died in 1700, but he still pretty much counts as an 18 th century dramatist). (And Mozart, who wrote the only operas I like.) During the 18 th century, England saw itself as a reincarnation of the Roman Republic under Augustus Caesar. This period of English history is even called the Augustan Age. They built the famous neoclassical buildings we’re familiar with today, both in London and in Washington, D.C. They translated and rewrote Latin literature. They modeled everything they could on Rome, and they tried to turn English into a Latinate language.
Which gave us rules like don’t split an infinitive. Why not? Because in Latin, an infinitive ( amare, “to love”; legere, “to read”; scribere, “to write”) is one word. You can’t stick an adverb in the middle of one word. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. You can’t do that in Latin, but in English? As Winston Churchill so famously wrote, “That is something up with which I will not put.” And use the proper case of pronoun. “Who” is subjective case, the subject of a sentence. “Whom” is objective case, a direct or indirect object, the object of a preposition. Thus, “about whom.” There are many more rules. But nowadays we’re not imitation Romans anymore, so we write in a looser fashion.
As a scholar and an editor, I’m of two minds about this looser modern writing. I suspect that no one except Dr. Johnson ever spoke that elaborate Latinate English, and we certainly don’t do so today. In fact, when the authors of books I’m editing starting writing stiff dialogue, I suggest that they go sit in the mall and listen to how people really talk. We talk in sentence fragments. We gesture a lot, and our gestures often become part of our sentences. We talk in rambling, run-on sentences with comma splice errors. We do not speak in Latinate—or even “correct”—English anymore. What I tell my authors to do is listen to rhythms of the sentences they hear. That’s the key to success in writing dialogue. (I almost never tell them, however, that we still speak in a kind of loose iambic pentameter, which is why Shakespeare is understandable today.)
Why do I love my T-shirt? Because of the “whom.” Because it’s formal. Because it’s funny. I have another T-shirt that says Be careful what you say. You may end up in my novel. Especially if your dialogue is interesting .