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By Jayne Spencer
I promise this is the last go-round on this who/whom usage topic.
Grammar policeman James Kilpatrick took the IU Home Pages to task the weekend before last in his weekly syndicated column "The Writer's Art."
It seems Kilpatrick was not at all pleased with our usage of the interrogative "who" in a poster we ran Sept. 19: "Who Do We Serve?" You can see the centerfold poster on line at this Web site:
http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/homepages/0919/text/whodo.htm
He joined (belatedly) any number of our readers. Aside from the fact he referred to Home Pages as a "student newspaper" (it's not) and the poster as "a formal statement of the university's purpose" (it's a poster; for heaven's sake, tape it to your file cabinet!), he got it right. The staff made a conscious decision NOT to use: "WHOM do we serve?" We were backed up by IUB English Professor Susan Gubar, who said using "whom" on a poster would be "very fuddy-duddy."
 Kilpatrick
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The column became fodder the next week for the listserv of writers and editors throughout the country called Copyediting-L.
But frankly, I think Kilpatrick made our point nicely in the fifth paragraph of his column: "Shakespeare tended to use who and whom interchangeably, depending on which sounded better to his ear."
Exactly right.
"Am I to be exiled to Fuddy Duddy Land? Piffle!" wrote Kilpatrick.
I vote yes to a ticket to Fuddy Duddy Land. With a side trip to Loosey-Goosey-Research Land.
As to "piffle," I try not to use archaic language.
Visit Kilpatrick's archives at this Web site:
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