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Oh, right. You were joking. Well, for God's sake, say so. I'm not typographitelepathic.
'Whom' is not a 'living fossil' any more than paragraphs, apostrophes and capital letters are. It's an indicator. You can do without it, but the result is not quite as clear. And whilst you claim to think my arguments are precious, you didn't engage with my point about other languages at all.
I'm glad you're amused to see myself and Haus in agreement. Perhaps you could put aside your sense of the remarkable for a second and consider that we rarely agree on anything...and that implies that this is either exceptional or obvious. Perhaps both.
This has nothing to do with preserving the work of fusty and dusty grammarians. It's about access to options and registers. It's about English being the most diverse and arguably the most adaptable langauge in the world, and retaining that tool of excellence in its fullest form. You can say almost anything you need to say with a vocabulary of two thousand words. Basic communication requires only eight hundred. English has perhaps two hundred thousand. Shall we just cut the dictionary, or do you think there might be some value in all that extra weight? |
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