Talk:whomever

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I thought some mention ought to be made of whomsoever. Whomever is rare at best and always has been. Whomsoever is found in 92,000 works at Project Gutenberg compared with 688 instances of of "whomever". Also, the explanation about when to use which pronoun isn't very helpful. If I want to know whether to say "whom are you looking at?" or "who are you looking at" I can't really substitute a "he" or a "him.--86.27.97.7 03:25, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Google books search, more weighted to modern, makes it much closer to equal, still favoring "whomsoever" ~ 3:2. Restricting date to 1980-2008 shifts balance to "whomever" 3:2. DCDuring 16:10, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

That's fair enough. I always felt "whomever" was a mistake or a back formation; most earlier authors never used "whomever" and in the present day both "whomever" and "whomsoever" are rare. That said, I can't really argue with actual use. There is a difficulty with the 1980 - 2006 search though. Of the first ten examples of whomever, six are from grammar books attempting to explain the word's use, so should probably be excluded; two are examples of hypercorrect, bad grammar ("What does your little girl feel toward dad, mom, or whomever is standing in front of you?", "Thanking whomever had intervened on his behalf..." - just as it's not correc to say "he thanked the man whom had intervened."). One example does not allow enough context for sure conclusions to be made. Only one is an example that would ever be cited in Wiktionary. By contrast, the first ten examples for "whomsoever" are clear, natural uses. This pattern seems to continue for later search results too. Anyway, I added a mention of whomsoever to this page, pointing out its existence without proscribing "whomever".--86.27.97.7 16:55, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

I'd bet that the 'extra' syllable "-so-" will dropped with increasing frequency wheresoever (ha-ha) it is still used (whoever, whomever), except where there is a competing use of the "-so-"-less competitor. "Whatsoever" won't want to be confused with "whatever", so often used as an intejection. If a misspelling like "garned" (for "garnered") gets 60-70% as many hits on Google Groups as "garnered", what chance does "whomsoever" have? DCDuring 18:52, 11 November 2007 (UTC)