Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Pablo Picasso

I’m sure you’ve heard the word whom before, but if you’re like most people, you don’t ever use it. Maybe when you take on a fake British accent and use a mock-posh tone you throw a whom in there for good measure, but you likely don’t know where it’s technically meant to go. Yes, whom means something different than who. Or at least, they’re meant to go in distinctly different places.

In this week’s guide to breaking grammar rules in fiction, I’ll break down the who-whom debacle. Mostly so you can feel confident to continue ignoring whom, but also so you can use the word properly if you choose otherwise.

Learn the Rule Like a Pro

Alright, before you can separate who from whom, you need to know some metalanguage. This isn’t school, so you don’t need to worry about memorizing any terms – you just need to understand the general concepts.

The Metalanguage

The base structure of every sentence has three parts: the subject, the predicate, and the object. The subject uses the predicate to interact with (or relate to) the object. Here are some examples:

• The dog chases the cat.
• We all enjoy reading books.
• The weather is calm and breezy.

All complete sentences follow this three-part structure. You don’t need to worry about predicates right now. All you need to remember is that subjects are at the beginning and objects are at the end.

We use different types of words in each part of the sentence. For the sake of today’s topic, you only need to know about one type of word: pronouns.

Pronouns are the words we use to refer to a person or object that has already been mentioned. She, he, I, it, they, we, and you are all pronouns. There are three versions (or “cases”) of each pronoun: the one that can be the subject, the one that can be the object, and the one that goes anywhere and signifies possession. For the singular third-person pronoun, the subjective case is he or she, the objective case is him or her, and the possessive case is his or hers. Here’s an example of how pronouns shift depending on where they are in the sentence:

• She gave him her book.
• He gave her his book.

I hope you aren’t overwhelmed with this metalanguage. As long as you have the concepts generally, we can now get to who and whom (and also whose, for those who are wondering).

Who Uses Whose Whom?

As you may have already guessed, who and whom (and whose) are all the same pronoun, just in different cases. You use who as a subject, whom as an object, and whose as a possessive. (Also, who’s simply means “who is.”)

When you’re unsure which case to use, replace the pronoun who with the appropriate version of he. If the pronoun becomes he, use who; if it becomes him, use whom; and if it becomes his, use whose. If the sentence is a question, you’ll also need to turn the sentence into a statement. This trick will make more sense with some examples:

• Who is my guest tonight?
  • He is my guest tonight.
• Whom should I give the key to?
  • I should give the key to him.
• Whose book is this?
  • This is his book.

Sometimes there are sentences inside of other sentences, which can make matters even more complicated. When that happens, just isolate your test to the sentence that is closest to the pronoun. Again, look at these examples to see what I mean:

• Whomever you decide to marry, I’m sure your family will be proud.
  • You decided to marry him.
• Sarah will pay $100 to whoever finds her lost dog.
  • He found her lost dog.
• Anna is determined to be friends with whomever she meets.
  • She met him.

Are you feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry! Whom is slowly dying out of the English language, so you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to.

Breaking It Like an Artist

English is a living language and every living language changes over time. We don’t speak the same way we did a hundred or a thousand years ago. Words drop out of usage, definitions change, and syntax slowly shifts. Whom, for the most part, isn’t used in speech anymore. That’s why the distinction between who and whom isn’t intuitive to you while the distinction between he and him is.

Nowadays, whom is really only used in formal writing, and unless it makes a surprise comeback, it’ll slowly disappear from that too. Grammarians are usually the last people to hold on dearly to disappearing rules, and once they do, it’s usually gone for good.

Grammarians have not let go of whom just yet. But honestly, if you use whom your writing will sound incredibly formal and, in certain contexts, very dated. Of course, formal and dated is very appropriate for certain narrative voices. It makes a lot of sense in historical fiction or any other fiction that’s meant to evoke a sense of old wisdom or archaic formality.

If your story has a narrative voice that’s meant to sound young, conversational, or modern, the word whom will call attention to itself and sound out of place. In my mind, whom could make sense in Neil Gaiman’s book Neverwhere or G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. On the other hand, whom would sound out of place in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games or Margaret Atwood’s A Complicated Kindness.

You can use whom to create a specific narrative voice, one that sounds formal, archaic, stuffy, or wise. Or you can abandon whom to times past and embrace the flow of our shifting living language. You choose.