The Sunday, February 12, 2012 online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education includes an article by Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware. It’s called “The Elements of Clunk” and contains some useful and valid criticisms of student writing, along with one egregious error on the part of the professor.
Yagoda presents a hypothetical paragraph that contains eleven “mistakes”:
For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, “Iron Man 2″.
Of the eleven errors in the paragraph, four have to do with punctuation, four are errors of grammar, and two are matters of spelling.
The professor makes his own mistake when it comes to explaining the error of using whomever in the following construction:
with whomever amongst our friends can go.
The phrase should read with whoever amongst our friends can go. (NOTE: Yagoda includes British amongst as one of the eleven errors.)
Here is the professor’s explanation of why whomever is incorrect:
In No. 5, while “whoever” is correct (you would say “we’ll go with he who can make it,” not “with him who can make it”), the error is reasonable because most of the time prepositions like “with” take an object, like “whom.”
The professor must have been in a hurry when he wrote that. No speaker of standard English would ever say “we’ll go with he who can make it.” And prepositions don’t take an object “most of the time.” Prepositions take objects all of the time.
The hypothetical student’s use of the object form whomever is incorrect because it is not the object of the preposition with, but the subject of the verb can go. The clause “whoever amongst our friends can go” is a noun clause functioning as the object of with. Speakers mess up on this kind of construction because the clause’s subject word stands next to a preposition, while its verb stands many words away from it.
Here’s my own explanation of when not to use a whom form.
