17 Feb A Grammar Blog–“who” and “whom”

A columnist in Toronto’s National Post writes that the NDP “isn’t going to win any more seats in Quebec, and it is going to lose seats at the next election, no matter who it elects as leader….”

The pronoun “who” is subject (like “I”, “we”, “they”).  “Whom” is object (like “me”, “us”, “them”).  In an active-voice sentence, the subject does the action:

Who is shoveling the snow?  I wonder who is making that noise.

The object receives the action:

You may speak to whomever you want.  Or in the National Post sentence above: It is going to lose seats at the next election, no matter whom it elects as leader….

The confusion generally arises because in contemporary speech, we tend to use “who” where grammatically, it should be “whom”:  Who are you talking to? is much more common than the correct version, Whom are you talking to?