The Death of a Pronoun

The word whom is going the way of the dodo.

From a piece in the Atlantic...

Whom, I am thrilled to inform you, is dying. But its death, I am less thrilled to inform you, has been slow. According to Google’s expansive collection of digitized books, the word has been on a steady decline since 1826. The 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English records a similar slump. Articles in Time magazine included 3,352 instances of whom in the 1930s, 1,492 in the 1990s, and 902 in the 2000s. And the lapse hasn’t been limited to literature or journalism. In 1984, after all, the Ghostbusters weren’t wondering, “Whom you gonna call?”

Whom, in other words, is doomed. As Mignon Fogarty, the host of the popular Grammar Girl podcast, told me: “I’d put my money on whom being mostly gone in 50 to 100 years.”

But why? One explanation is that the word has outlived its ability to fulfill the most important function of language: to clarify and specify.