RogBlog

Stanley Fish, in his most recent column, “Memo to the Superdelegates: No Principles, Please“, said several highly controversial things, most notably that the Democratic primary process isn’t really democracy, or to the extent that it is, it’s the kind that the Founding Fathers feared, and the superdelegates should limit that democracy by voting politically rather than by following the will of the people. However, he also ignited a small firestorm with a wh-pronoun, in the following sentence:

Whom do I think would make the best president?

and a couple more like it. Here’s a sampling from the comments:

• It’s interesting–and a bit dismaying–to read a piece that espouses pure principles of law and history, then lapses into a genteelism that confounds pure principles of grammar. A superdelegate might ask properly ask himself “Who do I think would make the best president…” but not “whom,” as “who” is the subject of the verb in this question rather than the object of “think.”
• Didn’t you used to teach English at a university somewhere in the US? So how come, Stan, you write, “Whom do you think would make/will be . . . ?

[ironically, this second comment brings up yet another murky grammatical corner of English, one that I’ve been perplexed about since high school: what is the categorial status of “used to”? My current belief is that it is an adverb with no flexibility in positioning, the main piece of evidence being that it doesn’t inflect, at least in writing. Assimilation/deletion makes it hard to figure out the situation in speech.]

• “Whom do I think would make the best president?” or “Whom do I think will be the best general election candidate?” are, as you say, appropriate political questions. They are, however, ungrammatical ones. Get after your copy editor. The correct pronoun in each case (no pun intended) is “Who.”
• [N]ot content shamelessly to shill for Sen. Clinton, Prof. Fish wholly abjures his celebrated expertise in English by writing, “Whom do I think would make the best President?”
• Yes, Fish used the wrong (Who|Whom) form, because he’s pretentious, but in reality it doesn’t make any semantic difference. “Whom” is used as a signal to say “I’m being a classy writer, look at me!” and not for any expressive power that it lends to the grammar of English.

Curiously, these critiques are the opposite of the usual prescriptivist attack in which a self-styled educated language maven scolds the uneducated public for using who when whom is normatively appropriate. Is this an instance of populist prescriptivism? The last poster puts her finger on a truly important point: that the word whom truly can be a target of hypercorrection in English — that is, overusing a form that is socially associated with prestige.

However, I’m not completely convinced that hypercorrection is necessarily the source of Fish’s “error”. If we look at the unextracted (non-question) version of the sentence structure, we see that the only way of testing for the case of the position from which the wh-pronoun is extracted is using a regular pronoun:

I think (that) (he/she/I/we/they/*him/*her/*me/*us/*them) will be busy tomorrow.

On the other hand, it seems to me that it’s possible to imagine more “immediately deictic” contexts in which the accusative pronoun doesn’t seem totally out of place:

A: Who do you think we should send to the conference to present our new work, you or C?

B: I think “me” would make the best choice to send to the conference because I know that audience better.

I’m not saying that this exchange reads beautifully, but I feel as if I could imagine hearing an exchange like this. The situation reminds me a bit of a presentation I have heard Larry Horn give on reflexives, though I can’t remember where the presentation was.  If I’m at all correct, then Fish may have had in mind a meaning that would correspond to something like the following unextracted form:

I think (Clinton/Obama) would make the best choice for president.

And, by analogy, having this context in mind could have led to the offending whom.

Of course, it could just be that Fish is pretentious…