The "I'm stumped" response.
It's OK. I understand. Being stupid has it's limitations.
And boy are you stupid. And I don't just throw these
insults out. I've proved it over and over with you.
"Who/Whom 'both are technically acceptable'." LOL! What a moron!
Will Wister, grammar stickler&purposeful deviator.
Will has 3 endorsements in
English (language).
Many prefer to use "who" informally. "Whom" is preferred in formal settings. This is why Twitter says "who to follow."
According to traditional prescriptive grammar, who is the subjective (nominative) form only, while whom is the corresponding objective form (like him is the objective form corresponding to he). However it has long been common, particularly in informal English, for the uninflected form who to be used in both cases, thus replacing whom in the contexts where the latter was traditionally used.
In 1978 the who–whom distinction was identified as having "slipped so badly that [it is] almost totally uninformative". According to the OED (2nd edition, 1989), whom is "no longer current in natural colloquial speech". Lasnik and Sobin argue that surviving occurrences of whom are not part of ordinary English grammar, but the result of extra-grammatical rules for producing "prestige" forms.[2]
However some prescriptivists continue to defend whom as the only "correct" form in functions other than the subject. Mair notes that: "whom is moribund as an element of the core grammar of English, but is very much alive as a style marker whose correct use is acquired in the educational system [, where it is taught]. [The use of whom] is highly restricted, but rather than disappear entirely, the form is likely to remain in use for some time to come because of its over prestige in writing."[3]
Retention of the who–whom distinction often co-occurs with another stylistic marker of formal or "prestige" English – avoidance of the stranded preposition. This means that whom can frequently be found following a preposition, in cases where the usual informal equivalent would use who and place the preposition later in the sentence.
