OPINION: To Who It May Concern
Ouch! That’s wrong, isn’t it? But why is it wrong? Can’t you say that “who” is the subject of the clause “who it may concern” and therefore it should be in the subjective case? But no, it is not the subject but the object. If you revise the word order it becomes “it may concern whom.” “Who” and “whom” are two of the words most mixed up by people writing today. Most people simply have no understanding of the logical structure underlying our English language — its grammar — and they often end up writing unclearly, even confusingly. It’s not just that “who” is often used when it should be “whom,” but that the reverse also happens.
To take an example from the June 20 New York Times, correspondent Helene Cooper, writing about the Obama-Putin encounter it Mexico over the Syrian uprising, described the Russian president “saying that no one country has the right to tell another people whom their leader should be.” Okay, here the subject of the clause was misunderstood. It should have read “who their leader should be.” If the writer (or the asleep-at-the-switch Times copy editor) had worded it as “whom they should prefer as their leader,” that would have been fine. In that case “whom” is the object of the verb “prefer.” The writer (or copy editor) evidently took the whole clause as an object of the verb “tell,” whereas actually “another people” is the object, and the modifying clause keeps its own grammatical logic.
Well, maybe this is all too tricky. To take the less dense example of a very common error, many people will say, “They gave it to her and I,” or even, “They gave it to she and I.” It’s as if a compound of two pronouns automatically takes the subjective case. But if you eliminate the second person, no one says, “They gave it to I.” Adding the second person doesn’t change the case, and it should be: “They gave it to her and me.”