The Secret

I never learned much grammar in school. Most of what I know has been gleaned from reading so much. I kind of picked it up through osmosis. When I was a freshman in high school, I asked my teacher to explain the difference between “who” and “whom”. He obliged and immediately launched into some long and complex explanation of the rules and the grammar that sounded less like an answer and more like a calculus formula. At least he knew, because when I was a sophomore, someone else asked our teacher to explain the difference, and she told us not to worry about it because she wasn’t sure herself.

You see why I never learned much grammar in school.

By this time, I had figured out the secret of who and whom myself. It was a wonderful find, akin to Indiana Jones’s discovery of the Ark of the Covenant. And it was wonderfully simple.

And now, dear friends, I share it with you.

The easiest way to figure out whether you need to use who or whom is this: if you can replace the interrogative pronoun (who/whom) with “him” and have the sentence make sense, then you need whom. Note that they both end in M. If you can replace it with “he”, then you need who. Note that they both end in a vowel.

Like this:

To whom did you send it?

You sent it to him.

To who did you send it? (Who did you send it to?)

You sent it to he.

Who gave you the card?

He gave you the card.

Whom gave you the card?

Him gave you the card.

Easy, right? Who is the subject. Whom is the object (notice the prepositions–to whom, for whom, by whom).

Please remember to use whom carefully. If you’re not sure, just use who because it’s the societal norm. Whom is not the fancy version of who, and should not be used as such. If you use it correctly, it makes you sound like you know what you’re talking about. If you use it incorrectly, it just makes you sound like a pretentious idiot because there are those of us who know how to use it.