JUNE CASAGRANDE
The nice and not-so-nice thing about writing a grammar column is
this: No careless mistake, no typo, no minor flub goes unnoticed. And
unlike all the other writers who make tiny language errors in
articles about city budgets and school dance classes, I get no slack.
Understandably so.
On several occasions, readers have sent me notes to criticize
mistakes in this column -- only to learn that their criticisms were
wrong and that I was right all along. This is not one of those times.
Three readers of last week's column busted me for writing, "The
media is obsessed." "Media" is the plural of "medium," as in "a
single news medium, many news media." So that was a mistake, no two
ways around it. There's actually a funny rule about the word "medium"
when you're talking about clairvoyants. In that case, the plural is
"mediums," not "media." So I should have written, "The media are
obsessed."
Two other readers pointed out in last week's column the phrase, "
... people who you once relied on ... " If I remember right, I had
started to write, " ... people who used to help you ... " then
changed my mind and started hitting the backspace key and just didn't
back up far enough. For me, the rewording process is the biggest
source of mistakes. I often leave in an errant word and end up with
sentences that say things like, "has is" and "am will." Of course,
those are also mistakes.
"Who" is a subject pronoun, reserved for times when "who" is
performing the action in the sentence. "He who expects this column to
be error-free is in for a big disappointment." "Whom" is an object
pronoun, the person the action is being performed upon. In last
week's phrase, "people who you once relied on," the subject -- the
person performing the action -- is "you." "You relied." So the person
you're relying on is the object: whom.
When in doubt about whether to use "who" or "whom," you can always
perform this simple test. Isolate just the verb and the subject, "you
relied," "he talked," "the congress voted," then plug in "him" and
"he" to see which works best. "You relied on he" or "you relied on
him"? "He talked to he" or "he talked to him"? "The congress voted
for he" or "the congress voted for him"? One is a subject, "he," the
other is an object, "him." So if "he" works best, use "who." If "him"
is the right choice, use "whom."
While the downside of writing a grammar column is that people
point out every mistake, the upside is that people who catch them are
