If you haven’t read my previous post about adjective clauses, now would be a good time to do so. As the totally real saying which I definitely didn’t just make up goes, “there’s never a bad time to brush up on your adjective clauses!”
When writers need to identify someone to the reader, the adjective clause is a handy way of doing so. (Noun Phrase Appositives are another good option. Choices! We love them.) Even if you’ve never heard the term “adjective clause” before, you’ve no doubt seen them used this way many times. Here are a few I noticed in recent news articles:
One senior, who had graduated over the weekend, said the accusation sent her into a frenzy. She gathered evidence to prove her innocence – she’d written her essays in Google Docs, which records timestamps – and presented it to Mumm at a meeting. (From “A professor falsely accused his class of using ChatGPT. Their diplomas are in jeopardy”)
A business news aggregation influencer with over 650,000 followers on Twitter who is best known for posting Bloomberg News headlines posted about a “Large Explosion near The Pentagon Complex” at 10:06 a.m. (From “Fake picture of explosion at Pentagon spooks Twitter”)
TikTok’s lawsuit names Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who is charged with enforcing the law. (From “TikTok sues Montana after state bans app”)
Notice that all of these adjective clauses are “who” clauses. “Whom” clauses are decidedly less common — words, like organisms, evolve or go extinct all the time, and “whom,” like the monarch butterfly, seems gravely endangered.
I hope the monarch can be saved, and yes, if I were in some bizarre trolley problem scenario in which I had to choose whether the butterflies or the word “whom” could survive the rest of the century, I’d 100% go with the butterflies every time. Thankfully, the chances I will ever have to make that choice are low.
The fundamental difference between “who” and “whom” is a grammatical one: “who” functions as a subject, while “whom” functions as an object. (I talk about subjects and objects in this post, if you need a refresher.)
In normal conversation, and in the ordinary course of your writing life, you’re probably not mentally tagging all of your parts of speech and diagramming your sentences, because why would you? We don’t need to know the rules of grammar or parts of speech in our home language to communicate effectively, any more than we need to know the mathematical formulas relating to velocity and trajectories in order to toss a treat to a dog. So what’s an easy, functional way to know when to use who vs whom in your semi-everyday life?
Easy: the letter M!
Because “who” is a sentence subject, it replaces he/she/they.
Because “whom” is an object, it replaces him/her/them.
“Him” and “them” both end in “m,” so there you have it — the “m” helps you remember to swap in “whom.” Here are some examples:
Would it be weird if you said “Our lab assistant, Dr. McEvilton, who we never trusted, turned out to be a spy”? Yes, but mainly because of the Dr. McEvilton/spy stuff. In contemporary English, we swap in “who” for “whom” all the time, and no one bats an eye.
If, however, you are in a formal writing situation and are worried that eye-batting is a realistic possibility? Keep calm, carry on, and let the Ms help you remember where to use “whom.”
Red Pen Pedestrian 