Clearing up Confusion
Who is the man with whom you were laughing?
Who is the subjective or nominative case of the word; in plain English, who acts as a subject or predicate nominative…most of the time. I don’t know who you are. Who steals my purse steals trash.
Whom is objective case; that is, it must be an object. It will follow a preposition or a verb that requires a direct object. That is the girl to whom I spoke.
In inverted sentence structure or in question form, occasionally who replaces whom. For example, You are whom? is the inverted form of Who are you? Unless you are comfortable and very confident in the use of who and whom, I recommend avoiding inverted structure.
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Realizing that it was a moot point, I decided to remain mute during the rest of the debate.
Moot and mute are very frequently confused. It’s a simple mistake, and easily corrected.
Mute means “unable to speak” or “silent.” Helen Keller was mute until she was taught to speak in her early teens.
Moot means “irrelevant or insignificant.” Whether or not we should have peanut butter sandwiches is a moot point, as we are 50 miles from home and cannot get any now.
3 Comments
What a fabulous blog! I’m adding this to my favorites.
By the way, I wrote my posting “Ain’t Nuthin but a Grammar Thang” from my writing blog about my wannabe grammar guru status before I found this blog, in case you were wondering. I didn’t intend for it to be a homage to your blog, but I don’t mind if it is.
Happy writing! May all your sentences be constructed well.
Thanks E-mum. Talk about a pet peeve! When I hear people saying “mute” instead of “moot” it drives me crazy. The two are wholly unconnected to each other. I work with someone who consistently uses mute instead of moot and, well, I’m too polite but in my head I’m busy correcting her.
Thanks for the clarification. Those darn words like see and sea, flee and flea can be confusing. If only they’d thrown an ‘L’ into ‘mute’ instead of a ‘T’ it would be a ‘mule’ making a moot point …….and I suppose we’d all be further confused.