The Chautauquan, Vol. V, February 1885 — Part 10-Cedar Herald Index

But now-a-days not one person in a hundred of the best bred and best educated speakers of English asks, Whom did you see? but, _Who_ did you see? Indeed, the latter form of the question may be regarded almost as accepted English. Yet in the latter phrase, as in the former, the pronoun is the object of the verb _see_, and should strictly have the objective form. But, Whom did you see? would now sound very formal and precise, almost priggish, like _gotten_ instead of _got_. When, however, the pronoun is brought in direct contact with the verb, as in the phrase, The man whom I saw, we shrink from insult to the little semblance of grammar that our language possesses, and give the word its objective form. The time will probably come, although it may be remote, when _whom_ will have altogether disappeared. As to _gotten_, its use is now so confined to the over-precise in this country as to make it almost an Americanism. Its disappearance from our language in England is also one of the evidences of the process of simplification which is still slowly going on. Another, which has taken place within the memory of the elder living generation, is the disappearance of the subjunctive mood, which is now obsolete, or so very obsolescent as to be met with very rarely. But thirty-five or forty years since correct writers used this mood, and wrote, for example, _if he go_ instead of _if he goes_. Of the effect of this grammarless condition of the English language we may see something in a subsequent article.

[B] Certain uneasy manipulators of speech have lately set themselves at making an impersonal English pronoun. Vanity of vanities! Make a pronoun? As well undertake to build a pyramid. Better. There is not a pronoun in use that was not hoary with age before the first stone of Keops was laid.

The Chautauquan, Vol. V, February 1885 — Part 10