(whoever*; 'whomever' would be used if it was on the receiving end of the action, e.g., 'I will vote for whomever they endorse')

Honestly, nobody cares about ‘whom’. It’s dead, along with ‘thou’ and a bunch of other archaic nonsense.

In the real world it’s just ‘who’.

This is crap. 'Thou' is part of a whole class of pronouns (2nd person informal) that are completely absent from all modern speech and writing. 'Whom' is the objective form of 'who'. I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them, who/whom. It's not used very often in speech, but it's used every day in formal writing and thus very much alive. There is no disagreement among educated speakers of the language as to which usage is correct and which is incorrect, only disagreement as to which is acceptable in context. Celebrating it's death is celebrating ignorance.

English, like every other language on earth, is defined by its users. It evolves over time.

Very true. In my life time I hope to see "they/their" as both singular and plural. It would save me a lot of time because I dislike having to write "he or her," "his or hers," or think of a creative way to write around the idea completely.

I also hope to see the alienation of the comma-quotation rules (always inside). -Maybe I ask for too much

Celebrating its death

Good to see Muphry's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law) is still in full effect.

It's not Hacker News until someone corrects you with facts.

It's not required, but if you know what it means, using it allows you to be more eloquent. Shakespeare never put his sub-clauses in any rigid order, but never used commas either—and he got away with it because all these little hinting words in Early Modern allowed him to rearrange the sentence parts without losing any meaning.

It's sort of like type hinting :)

Calling parts of the language you don't happen to use "dead" is dead.

Also, in the real world, the expression "the real world" is a great way to win an argument without saying anything insightful.

This probably isn't the right place to have the descriptivism vs prescriptivism debate, is it? But historically, English has been whatever people who write and speak English say it is. There ain't no Academie Francaise here...

It is ironic that you point that out. I would not have corrected him had he misused 'who' (i.e., if he had used it for the objective case) -- that would have been a little 'less wrong' than using the supposedly dated 'whom' for the subjective case, as others have said.

That said, I didn't want to be rude or impolite. To lessen the impact of the statement, as to make it 'just a side note!', I enclosed it in parentheses. But that seems to have done little good, since it has ensued another discussion of its own! Oh well, I hope someone out there maybe learned something interesting. :)

Cheers!

Speak for yourself. I care about such things.

Ignorance is not really bliss.

I guess your not wrong; that is how language evolves. However, I prefer precision. The worst offence is the incredible number of people who use "ignorant" as a moniker for "stupid", which is perhaps the most ironic of all mistakes.

I suppose "your" prone to these imprecisions as well? ;)

Also, 'moniker' != 'synonym'

At least this entire thread was devoted to the content of my message. </sarcasm>

That said, the original responder was right - I made a technical mistake. This I have learned from.

THAT said, I can't believe there are this many English sticklers on Hacker News. (I however view this as a good thing, as it contributes to more logical discourse and less lawlz, etc).