~~~
Day’s Verse:
I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
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I just attempted to read the following.
After passing my eyes over these paragraphs a few times, I have decided that, really, my ability to correctly use whoever versus whomever on the extremely rare occasion such a situation may arise is not worth my sanity. There’s a time to struggle through to perfect grammar, and then there’s a time to admit defeat. I think this is a prime example of the latter.
Bill Bryson is his “Dictionary of Troublesome Words” pointed out that many authorities consider the distinction between who and whom to be on the way out.
Funny you should mention that. The grammar text I’m studying actually acknowledges that: “The pronoun whom is rarely used today, except in formal written or spoken English. You can probably go through an entire week without hearing the pronoun whom even once. Its use in spoke English is probably what my friend Edie Schwager (1991) calls a ‘lost cause’–an ‘LC.’
“In formal English, the type of English used in medical and scientific writing, however, the pronoun whom still exists and must be used correctly.”
Dang.
I’ve probably gone through an year without hearing anyone use “whom.”