Whom loves you? Who, whom, Geoffrey Pullum and the Oatmeal

Question

Every once in a while, someone submits a who/whom question. Apparently, the use of who and whom continues to confuse many educated people, even university students at Cornell:

In searching for a duplicate for the most recent one, I had to sift through a lot of questions, and found a near perfect match in a closed question.

The recent OP's example and the closed example:

• They chose the candidate whom they thought would have the best initiative.
• They interviewed several candidates whom he thought had the experience and qualifications he required.

I'm no site searching wiz, so it took me a while to find the best answer. If it took me a while, I can only sympathize with someone relatively new searching among all the who/whom answers here.

We have at times brought up consolidating answers into a comprehensive reference. Thanks to good answers (including Dr. Lawler's), Geoffrey Pullum (Language Log) and the Oatmeal, I think I have a pretty good handle on who and whom, the trends regarding it, the hypercorrection problem, etc.

I'm volunteering to make an attempt at one comprehensive answer, if there is consensus that we could use one.

Should I try, and if so, to whom do I submit my answer for evaluation?

Answer 1

I like canonical answers, myself. You can ask and answer your own question, and doing so is explicitly encouraged to further the objective of sharing knowledge. As to who would evaluate it, that would be via community votes as usual.

You might consider preparing the question and answer off-line and then simply pasting them in one go. There’s even http://stackedit.io to help with that: you can prepare and preview text formatted with Markdown, and (if you want to) sync and share via Dropbox or Google Docs before final publication. You can also set up a Chat room.

A blog post would be a good starting point and could test the waters regarding community opinion (via comments on it, or chat about it, as there’s no voting). The blog is separate and not searched via the site search, but you could write a canonical answer based on the blog post and any subsequent discussion.