This discussion is locked.
You cannot post a reply to this discussion. If you have a question start a new discussion

Who's watching who[m]?

I gather the Multimedia Communications network’s Executive Committee discussed whether in the title of this event it should be "who" or "whom" and decided that whilst whom is grammatically correct it felt too formal and went with ‘who’.

I have also been told that the Committee
appreciated that it could be a controversial decision for some and therefore an interesting way to generate attention for the event.

It certainly caught my attention.

I showed the first instance of the advertisement that I saw, without explanation, to my wife, who (having been both a scientist and an English teacher) was even more horrified than me.

My initial reaction on hearing that this was the result of a conscious decision was to acquiesce.

However, I am concerned that following this path inevitably leads to the evolution of language as a whole to become no only less formal, but also less structured and consequently less precise; witness the increasingly endangered adverb. As a professional institution in a field where precision is of particular importance, I wonder if in such a situation we should be following the herd.

This seems an admirable topic of debate in a forum dedicated to multimedia communications.


  • We did discuss to use the grammatically correct 'Who's Watching Whom'... rather than the final choice of 'Who's Watching Who'. As several have found before us, being grammatically correct is not punchy when it comes to headlines, titles or sounding good when in conversation so we went with the more relaxed form.


    Language is an interesting subject, particularly when it comes to what is 'correct' ... 'correct' (or fitting an accepted and unchanging form) has only come about within the last couple of hundred years and now with English being a language that is adapting to the modern age where it is effectively becoming the world's language, in many ways it is returning to its evolutionary path of adapting in usage as evidenced in many areas, the dropping or reducing of the 'whom' in conversational English. Being more like Shakespeare in creating new words and usage is good company...