This 'whom' is a keeper

Sometimes it seems like “whom” should die. It causes so many people so much distress. Not many people know how to use it. And a lot of people who think they know how to use it don’t.

For example, I see "whom" used a lot in ways such as this: “John is a man whom I know will always help us when we need him.” People who know that “whom” is an object figure that, in a sentence like this, it’s functioning as an object of the verb “know.” But it’s not. The object of the verb “know” in this sentence is not a single word but a whole clause “who will always help us.” Clauses need subjects. The verb “help” in this clause needs a subject. So correct here would be the subject pronoun “who”: “John is a man who I know will always help us.”

Sometimes it seems “whom” is just mean. And because it’s fading from all from the most formal uses, it’s tempting to look forward to the day we can bid it good riddance.

But here’s why “whom” is not going to die: in one specific construction, people clearly prefer it.

“I’m spending the day with my sister, with who I share many interests.”

That’s totally unnatural, right? Even in the most casual usage, someone who finds herself hemmed in to a sentence like this is going to say “with whom I share” and not “with who.”

In fact, anytime the pronoun comes immediately after a preposition, people seem to prefer “whom”

with whom

to whom

from whom

True, this situation doesn’t come up much. Casual speech usually sidesteps these constructions, for example by putting the pronoun at the beginning and the preposition at the end (“Who are you going to the movies with” instead of “With whom are you going to the movies”). But in those less-common situations, I don’t see “whom” disappearing anytime soon.

'My boyfriend and I's'?

With all the working from home, cultural divisiveness, addiction to screens and the rise of AI “companions,” humans are becoming ever more isolated. That’s a bad thing. But there’s an upside. As we go through life desperately alone and starved for human contact, at least we’re less likely to make shared possessive errors like this one from a travel post on Reddit: “I bought my boyfriend and I’s tickets at the same time.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen “I’s,” but it’s still a shocker. Who thinks it would be a good idea to say, “That’s I’s car” or “I should get started filing I’s taxes” or “Do these pants make I’s backside look big”? No one.

We all know “I” isn’t used as a possessive. It’s a subject: I have a car. I filed my taxes. I am wearing unflattering pants.

So how do these errors happen? How can we get so confused about a pronoun we all know so well? Human contact. The other person. In the case of that Reddit poster, her boyfriend was the culprit. Had the poor woman flown to Hawaii alone, sure, she would have missed out on a marriage proposal, but at least she would have had the sense to say, “I bought my ticket.”

This error is related to the much more common “with John and I” mistake that, frankly, almost everyone makes. “With” is a preposition, prepositions take objects and “me,” not “I,” is the object form that belongs here: “with John and me.” But “I’s” takes this to a whole new level.

It’s a safe bet that people who misuse “I” labor under the false belief that “me” is incorrect or at least improper when paired with another person. A kid who says, “Billy and me are going to the park” gets corrected pretty swiftly: “It’s ‘Billy and I,’ not ‘me,’” adults tell them. The kid walks away with the lesson that, if he wants to get to the park with the least hassle possible, he should just always use “I.”

On top of all that, we’re not taught how to handle shared possessives. Is it “My boyfriend’s and my” or “my boyfriend and my”? I’ve studied this stuff for years and even I am not comfortable with this.

I know the rules for shared possessives: “Ed’s and Louise’s cars” is correct if they own the cars individually. If they own the cars jointly, it’s “Ed and Louise’s cars.” That’s because the rule says that if possession is shared, Ed and Louise share an apostrophe and s, too. But when people possess things separately, each gets their own apostrophe and s.

That’s an easy rule when you’re working with nouns like Ed, but when you’re working with pronouns like “my,” things get weird. “Ed’s and my cars” is easy enough if Ed and I own our cars separately, but if we share cars, a strict reading of the rules requires us to say, “Ed and my cars.” The absence of an apostrophe and s after Ed’s name strikes me as unnatural. And I don’t hear other people saying “Ed and my …” No matter who owns what, they say “Ed’s and my.”

Other pronouns pose the same difficulty:  If you want to talk about the jointly owned “Ed and Louise’s cars” but you’re using a pronoun for Louisa, you’d get “Ed and her car,” which is unclear and sounds wrong.

In these cases, I openly defy the rule about sharing possession. I say “Ed’s and her cars” no matter whether they own the cars together or separately. As long as I’m not using “I’s,” it’s unlikely anyone will even know if I’m wrong.

'Predominantly' or 'predominately'?

Here’s a word that caught my eye while I was editing an article a while back: predominately.

The context was something like “Brazil is a predominately Portuguese-speaking country.” I didn’t notice the spelling of predominately until my second read.  And spell-checker didn’t notice either.

I quietly congratulated myself for catching the error, changed it to predominantly and continued reading the piece. But a few minutes later, I got the urge to check a dictionary. To my surprise, it was in both Webster’s New World College Dictionary (the dictionary required by the style guide I was using that day) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (which is the one I use when I’m editing in Chicago style). Both list predominately as a variant of predominantly.

I understand that the dictionaries’ job is to document usage, but I don’t think I’d ever seen predominately before. Unless this spelling had been slipping unnoticed under my nose for years, I had only ever seen predominantly.

Not that it mattered. In editing, we always use to the dictionary’s preferred forms and never the variants. So predominantly was the right choice for the article.

But the whole thing was pretty surprising — not just that a spelling I’d never noticed before warranted listing in the dictionary, but because it’s a strange one.

Adverbs often derive from adjectives: smart/smartly, nice/nicely, true/truly. So the adverb predominantly makes sense as a form of the adjective predominant. But predominate is a verb, and verbs don’t usually spin off adverb forms: walk/walkly, know/knowly, keep/keeply, dominate/dominately.

Chalk this one up as another example of our ever-surprising language.

Can 'quote' mean 'quotation'?

Years ago, someone told me you can’t use the word “quote” to mean “quotation.” As in, you can’t say, “There aren’t enough quotes in this article.” You have to say, “There aren’t enough quotations in this article.”

I think it came with a little lecture on nouns vs. verbs — that is, that “quote” is a verb, you quote someone, and “quotation” is a noun, you use his quotation. But I’m not sure. It was a long time ago.

When you get a piece of advice like this, the logical thing to do is check it. The answer’s as close as the nearest dictionary. So of course, I didn’t. I just spent the next who-knows-how-many years deleting “quote” and replacing it with “quotation” anytime I was worried who might see it.

There’s an old saying about laziness — something about how it ends up causing you more work. I’m sure I could find it if I tried.

But instead, I’ll spend my one precious bit of energy today looking up “quote.”

Surprise, surprise. In Merriam-Webster’s, Webster’s New World, and American Heritage dictionaries, after its main entry as a verb, it says that “quote” can also be a noun — a synonym of “quotation.”

So all these years I could have been saying, “Let’s add another quote” or “I don’t like this quote” instead of worrying that I’d get rapped on the knuckles for not using “quotation” instead.

What’s that famous quote? “Better late than never”?