10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s ok to break (sometimes) (IV)

By Steven Pinker Who and whomWhen Groucho Marx was once asked a long and orotund question, he replied, “Whom knows?” A 1928 short story by George Ade contains the line “’Whom are you?’ he said, for he had been to night school.” In 2000 the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm showed an owl in […]

By Steven Pinker

Who and whom
When Groucho Marx was once asked a long and orotund question, he replied, “Whom knows?” A 1928 short story by George Ade contains the line “’Whom are you?’ he said, for he had been to night school.” In 2000 the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm showed an owl in a tree calling “Whom” and a raccoon on the ground replying “Show-off!” A cartoon entitled “Grammar Dalek” shows one of the robots shouting, “I think you mean Doctor Whom!”
The popularity of “whom” humour tells us two things about the distinction between “who” and “whom”. First, “whom” has long been perceived as formal verging on pompous. Second, the rules for its proper use are obscure to many speakers, tempting them to drop “whom” into their speech whenever they want to sound posh.
So you may be inclined to agree with the writer Calvin Trillin when he wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.” But this is an overstatement. There are times when even non-butlers need to know their “who” from their “whom”.
It ought to be straightforward. The distinction between “who” and “whom” is identical to that between “he” and “him” or “she” and “her”, which no one finds difficult. We say “He kissed the bride,” so we ask “Who kissed the bride?” We say “Henry kissed her,” so we ask “Whom did Henry kiss?” But even after a century of nagging by prescriptive grammarians, the “who–whom” distinction remains tenuous in speech and informal writing. Only the stuffiest prig would say “Whom are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” “It’s not what you know; it’s whom you know,” or “Do you know whom you’re talking to?” And when people do try to write with “whom”, they often get it wrong, as in “Whomever installed the shutters originally did not consider proper build out.”
Like the subjunctive mood, the pronoun “whom” is widely thought to be circling the drain. Indeed, tabulations of its frequency in printed text confirm that it has been sinking for almost two centuries. The declining fortunes of “whom” may represent not a grammatical change in English but a cultural change in Anglophones, namely the informalisation of writing, which makes it increasingly resemble speech. But it’s always risky to extrapolate a downward slope all the way to zero, and since the 1980s the curve seems to be levelling off. Though “whom” is pompous in short questions and relative clauses, it is a natural choice in certain other circumstances, even in informal speech and writing. We still use “whom” in double questions like “Who’s dating whom?”, and in fixed expressions like “To whom it may concern” and “With whom do you wish to speak?”. A scan of my email turns up hundreds of hits for “whom” in unmistakably informal sentences such as “Not sure if you remember me; I’m the fellow from Casasanto’s lab with whom you had a hair showdown while at Hunter College.”
The best advice to writers is to calibrate their use of “whom” to the complexity of the construction and the degree of formality they desire. If William Safire, who wrote the New York Times’ “On Language” column and coined the term “language maven” in reference to himself, could write, “Let tomorrow’s people decide who they want to be president,” so can you.

Very unique
They say you can’t be a little bit married or a little bit pregnant, and purists believe that the same is true for certain other adjectives. One of the commonest insults to the sensibility of the purist is the expression “very unique” and other phrases in which an “absolute” or “incomparable” adjective is modified by an adverb of degree such as “more”, “less”, “somewhat”, “quite” or “almost”. Uniqueness, the purists say, is like marriage and pregnancy: something is either unique (one of a kind) or not unique, so referring to degrees of uniqueness is meaningless. Nor can one sensibly modify “absolute”, “certain”, “complete”, “equal”, “eternal”, “perfect” or “the same”. One may not write, for instance, that one statement is “more certain” than another, or that an apartment is “relatively perfect”.
A glance at the facts of usage immediately sets off Klaxon horns. Great writers have been modifying absolute adjectives for centuries, including the framers of the American Constitution, who sought “a more perfect union”. Many of the examples pass unnoticed by careful writers, including “nothing could be more certain” and “there could be no more perfect spot”. Though the phrase “very unique” is universally despised, other modifications of “unique” are unobjectionable, as when Martin Luther King wrote, “I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson, and the great grandson of preachers.”
Here is the flaw in the purists’ logic. Uniqueness is not like pregnancy and marriage; it must be defined relative to some scale of measurement. I am told that all snowflakes are unique, and so they may be under a microscope, but frankly, they all look the same to me. Conversely, each of the proverbial two peas in a pod is unique if you squint hard enough through a magnifying glass. Does this mean that nothing is unique, or does it mean that everything is unique? The answer is neither: the concept “unique” is meaningful only after you specify which qualities are of interest to you and which degree of resolution or grain size you’re applying. Calling something “quite unique” or “very unique” implies that the item differs from the others in an unusual number of qualities, that it differs from them to an unusual degree, or both. In other words, pick any scale or cutoff you want, and the item will still be unique.
This doesn’t mean that you should go ahead and use “very unique”. “Very” is a soggy modifier in the best of circumstances, and the combination with “unique” grates on enough readers that it’s wise to avoid it.

Count nouns, mass nouns and “ten items or less”
English speakers can conceptualise aggregates as discrete things, which are expressed as plural count nouns, such as “pebbles” or as continuous substances, which are expressed as mass nouns, such as “gravel”. Some quantifiers are choosy as to which they apply to. We can talk about “many pebbles” but not “much pebbles”, “much gravel” but not “many gravel”. Some quantifiers are not choosy: we can talk about “more pebbles” or “more gravel”.
Now, you might think that if “more” can be used with both count and mass nouns, so can “less”. But it doesn’t work that way: you may have “less gravel”, but most writers agree that you can only have “fewer pebbles”, not “less pebbles”. This is a reasonable distinction, but purists have extended it with a vengeance. The sign over supermarket express checkout lanes, “Ten Items or Less”, is a grammatical error, they say, and as a result of their carping upscale supermarkets have replaced the signs with “Ten Items or Fewer”. By this logic, off licences should refuse to sell beer to customers who are “fewer than 21 years old” and law-abiding motorists should drive at “fewer than 70 miles an hour”. And once you master this distinction, well, that’s one fewer thing for you to worry about.
Clearly, the purists have botched the “less-fewer” distinction. “Less” is perfectly natural with a singular count noun, as in “one less car” and “one less thing to worry about”. It’s also natural when the entity being quantified is a continuous extent and the count noun refers to units of measurement, such as “21 years old” and “70 miles an hour”; like the 1-11 scale on Nigel Tufnel’s favourite amplifier in This Is Spinal Tap, the units are arbitrary. And “less” is idiomatic in certain expressions in which a quantity is being compared to a standard, such as “Describe yourself in 50 words or less.” Like many dubious rules of usage, the less-fewer distinction has a smidgen of validity as a pointer of style. In cases where “less” and “fewer” are both available, such as “Less/fewer than 20 of the students voted”, “fewer” is the better choice because it enhances vividness and concreteness. But that does not mean that “less” is a grammatical error.