Recently I read a post by a highly educated person who wrote the following:
“The Ottomans even had a struggle for whom would run the empire….”
“whom” here is clearly not the object of a preposition, “for”, but the head word of a clause, which itself is the object of the preposition. The pronoun “who” is the subject in the clause and therefore is nominative in case, not accusative (of course, “whom” itself derives from Old English dative; “whone” was the accusative…… oh well.)
I intend to show this to my students, mentioning that the very day I wrote ’whom’ on the board and cautioned them that most people who try to use it can run into trouble, I read this post. Serendipity.
I have many examples of this misuse of whom, but if I were to post them to a listserv, I would be accused of ’attacking’. I’ve come to realize that ’attacking’ is another word for evidence