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That of whom which we speak
By adamg on Wed, 09/27/2023 - 9:40am
MIT News reports on research by an MIT linguistics professor and one of his students on an emerging phrase in English: "Whom of which."
Pesetsky, who has been teaching linguistics at MIT since 1988, had never encountered the phrase “whom of which” before.
“I thought, ‘What?’” Pesetsky recalls.
But to Evile, “whom of which” seems normal, as in, “Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals.” After the class she talked to Pesetsky. He suggested Evile write a paper about it for the course, 24.902 (Introduction to Syntax).
And now the two have written a research paper: Wh-which relatives and the existence of pied-piping, and, no, that title is not stuttering.
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Comments
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Whomofwhich, Whomofwhich, and Irregardless, from their brief entitled, "Our Mind Was Literally a Million Miles Away."
What of what?
What of what?
Which Wich
That WhichWich sandwich place needs to be all over this.
Superfluous language
“Our striker, who is our best player, scores a lot of goals” is sufficient. "Whom of which" is unnecessary.
I do not understand the point of adding unnecessary words. They are a waste of bandwidth.
different meaning
The point of "whom of which" in the example is that the speaker was referring to the team's best striker, not necessarily the team's best player.
Mad Frank
Was my English teacher in 8th grade at BLS in1963. He gave us an unforgettable sentence that we had to analyze and define the grammatical usage of each word: “He said that that that that that boy said was incorrect.” Now, that’s a sentence!
English teacher here
And I understand that multi-that sentence just fine! "Whom of which" has me completely befuddled.
Linguistics…
Linguistics is a descriptive science: it studies how people actually talk and write. No matter how irritatingly “wrong” you and I find “whom of which” (to me it’s right up there with fingernails on chalkboard), there it is, out there in the wild, waiting to be catalogued, tracked, and analyzed.
Omit Needless Words
Will Strunk is spinning in his grave
Unnecessary words?
Yours has a word count of 5 and a 6 syllable count while "whom of which" has 3 & 3. It seems that your phrase is the one containing the superfluous language.
It's 2023, bandwidth for
It's 2023, bandwidth for plain text is not a problem here. Thus, your sentence about bandwidth is, self-referentially, unnecessary.
I will not put
The use of "whom of which" is something up with which I will not put.
(H/T to Winston Churchill).
It sounds weird to me to.
It sounds weird to me to. However, I am commenting as an excuse to quote this sentence from the paper, "There is of course no better sign that a syntactic construction forms part of the real grammar of real speakers than prescriptivists protesting against its use.
Bigger Fish
We have much bigger issues to sort out now, like Livvy rizzing up Baby Gronk, who may or may not be the new drip king.
On accident?
Speaking of linguistics, how are we feeling about “on accident?”
It bugs me, because the standard English usage is “by accident. When I first started hearing it, I figured it was non-native speakers, or maybe some regional variant, but I looked into it and apparently it’s not, and the divide between “by accident” and “on accident” runs pretty sharply according to the age of the speaker. We’re watching the language change, which is kind of cool….
There’s no objective reason why one should be better than the other, and it’s a reasonable argument that “on purpose” and “by accident” ought to have different prepositions. At the same time, there’s no reason to split “by accident” apart from its friends “by chance,” “by design,” “by happenstance,” etc.
Buffalo, whom of which ...
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.