According to the AP Stylebook (which is the writing bible in my professional world), this is how you can tell the diff between "who" and "whom". (Page 291 in my edition.)

"Who" is the pronoun used for references to human beings and animals with a name. It is grammatically the subject (never the object) of a sentence, clause or phrase: "The woman who rented the room left the window open." "Who is there?"

"Whom", on the other hand: used when someone is the object of a verb or proposition: "The woman to whom the room was rented left the window open." "Whom do you wish to see?"

Or, you could just rephrase the whole sentence so you can avoid the issue. :-)

And Vee - I had no idea about grammar/punctuation until I'd graduated US college and was in grad school getting ready to teach English to a load of freshmen. I had to learn it fast if I was going to teach it! In fact, even now, there are grammatical conundrums which come up and I usually end up going here: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ 
Good resource. Plus - English English grammar is different from US English grammar. Rather confusing at first.

Back to reading: I'm deep in the middle of my first time read of "Kindred" by Octavia E. Butler. It's way out of my usual reading focus, and it's really good. It's sci-fi (perhaps more speculative fiction), and was the first published sci-fi book written and published by an African-American female author. It's about time-travel or perhaps time-slippage. Really good. #BlackHistoryMonth. :-)

Interesting discussion about grammar. I had to study English grammar in elementary school but I learned more through reading than memorising rules. The same goes for my native language.

Lemonhead, I don't often find myself in need of using "whom" in my writing, but I always hesitate before I write it out.

As for reading, I finished London Under and started on The Lambs of London (same author). I like it so far.

My current audio book is New York to Dallas, an installation in J.D. Robb's In Death series.

Donna - Based on your description, I picked up a library copy of The Breakdown by B. A. Paris a few days ago - and I too finished it in three days, which is not my style. Yes, it's that compelling. The ending surprised me also - at least the very end of it did. I liked it BUT I did not like the fact that the "good" character lied at every opportunity herself, often for no good reason so far as I could see.

The who/whom problem reminds me of something amusing I read.

A lady rang a number and as she didn't recognise the responding voice asked "To whom am I speaking?" to be answered by "Lady, you have a wrong number. I don't know anyone who says whom!"

I wasn't raised by teachers but my parents were strict about spoken grammar, it was knowing the definitions that confused me. Apart from being taught things like "Verbs are 'doing' words" that is all that sunk in.

You notice I wrote "that" but my journalist husband preferred "which" in that context.

I am careful when writing here as many RPers are very well educated and I feel I have to be as correct as I can. Thankfully I don't get marked!

Ann, our textbook definition of a verb was an action word or state of being. Mama once had a student write on a test " . . . a state of beans." Made as much sense to him as the definition, evidently..

I'm about half way through Superfluous Women by Carola Dunn, a Daisy Dalrymple book. I'm quite fond of Daisy. The title comes from the name given to the two million British women left with no one to marry after WWI.

I read Elizabeth Goudge's autobiography some years ago. She described herself as one of those "superfluous" women. She mentioned that she loved children dearly, but there was no man for her to marry. She wrote of children quite lovingly in her novels, and perhaps a shade unrealistically, but why not if it gave her pleasure?

She lived with a woman companion which today would be interpreted as a partnership. However, given her Edwardian background and devout Christianity, I suspect it was a combination of friendship, loneliness, and economic practicality that motivated them to share a home.

Rosefolly, when I was a 'young woman about town', which sounds more glamorous than it really was, all females shared flats/apartments with each other, as did young men. In those long ago days of the '60's no-one was suspected of having a same-sex relationship. Even when older women shared a house, the arrangement was not questioned. The companion was often a rather hard-up but genteel friend/relation who was provided with a roof over her head in return for undertaking small tasks and having to put up with being slightly looked down on . . .

I used to enjoy Elizabeth Goudge but I think I would find her work rather schmaltzy today.

Annpan, I can follow grammatical explanations where eg's are given (thank you Lemonhead/Liz) but when people talk about the subject/object etc of a sentence my brain goes into overload. DH can help with some of it because he 'did' Latin at school. And to think I 'did' 'O' and 'A' level English!

'Whom' is a word rather like 'thus' hardly ever heard in everyday speech.

My father jumped on us when we used 'can' instead of 'may'.

"Daddy, please can I have an icecream?"

" Well, I suppose you can have one, meaning 'are you able' to have one" followed by no further response.

So we tried again.

"Daddy, please may I have an icecream?"

Vee, I also had 'can' and 'may' drilled into me! I did study Latin for four years but that never helped my English grammar. I only went as far as O levels before I left school.

In addition to the three hours of nightly homework, I also worked at weekends and during school holidays serving at the cafes attached to the local fun fair and by sixteen, I had had enough and wanted a job with only a forty hour week!

Anything I learned after that was from reading and listening to the wireless.

There have been several Agatha Christie TV and movie productions on local TV recently. I have then borrowed the books and wonder why the script writers cut characters, which could be an economic reason, paying less actor's fees but then write in new and rather unnecessary ones! Eg, in Hallowe'en Party, two adult children for Mrs. Drake and a new subplot with a vicar!

Don'e envy me the hot spell we have had, it has rained too, so I am sticky from humidity and tormented by mosquito bites! At 11.30pm, it is a 'cooler' 75F!!

Eggcorns : The Gaffes That Spread Like Wildflowers

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/30/410504851/eggcorns-the-gaffes-that-spread-like-wildflowers

Kathy, I’m glad you liked The Break Down! I just checked out Behind Closed Doors by the same author. I also checked out Memory Man by David Baldacci.

Donna

Rosefolly, I also read that Eliz. Goudge autobiography. I think it was "The joys of the Snow." I also wondered about her female "companion". I agree her novels to today's minds read very saccharine or schmaltzy. I have a female friend who is a born again Christian, who adores Goudge's novels, and owns every single one. I suspect they are now out of print. Many women of Goudge's era were single because so many of their male would be future husbands were killed in WW I.

About grammar, in so many recent British books I have read, I notice the use of "round" for "around." Americans would say or write: "He walked around the block." Whereas the English usage removes the "a." Why isn't this considered "slang"?

Mary, I had never considered the use, or not, of 'round' or 'around', but on looking it up I find that the words in the eg you give above are more or less interchangeable. I don't think for the use of 'round' can be considered slang . . . it would be necessary to use quite a different word to replace it.

I am trying to read more non-fiction this year, so just finished up A Cold Welcome, by Sam White, a history professor at Ohio State. Subtitled "The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America," it focuses on Europeans' first 3 lasting settlements in North America: Santa Fe by the Spanish, Jamestown by the English, and Quebec by the French. Enlightening, especially since the only one of these I remember learning about was Jamestown, maybe because I live here in Virginia. All three of these started up in the first decade or so of the 1600's, and faced unusually cold winters as well as droughts, both of which affected the native nations as well, causing a lot of hardship on everyone. White included a short discussion of the methods used to reconstruct the climate, which was good but not quite enough from my perspective, and although he included several useful maps, he showed NO climate data, only talked about it. Sigh. But for those interested in the topic, a worthwhile read.

After that I went back to fiction. :) I found a fantasy book from a new author, Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale, that is based on a Russian fairy tale, and set in medieval Russia. She evokes the setting and culture really well, and although some reviewers faulted the book for a too-easy ending, I enjoyed it enough that I will look for the projected second book in the set.

Enjoying the grammar discussion, and Yoyo, I chuckled at the article in the link when I realized that I'd completely missed the eggcorn in the headline! Duh!

Perhaps the word round was originally 'round ?

As in "she'll be comin' 'round the mountain when she comes "

Well, I'm on my 4th book of the month (the 3rd, read in a day, not really worth mentioning). I've only just started it--Wallis's War: A Novel of Diplomacy and Intrigue" by Kate Auspitz. From the back blurb: "In this fanciful novel written in the form of a fictional memoir, Auspitz imagines an alternative history in which [Wallis] Simpson was encouraged by Allied statesmen to remove defeatist, pro-German Edward from the throne, forever altering the course of the war."

It's exceedingly well written, and I can tell I'm going to really enjoy it.

Re the grammar discussion. I had to chuckle. So many people detest grammar, but I admit, I enjoy it. I had 4 years of Latin, 4 years of French, 3 of Spanish, 2 of German, a little Russian, a little Hebrew. I can't do anything with any of them any more, but I had a sound grounding in English grammar, and I got the grammar part of those languages. I also developed and taught a college level workshop called "Grammar for Foreign Language" students, giving them the basics so that they could understand directives such as, "Adjectives must agree in gender and number with the noun they modify."

And I admit with some level of embarrassment that I enjoyed diagramming sentences. Oh boy!

But just to add, knowing English grammar does not help a person become a skillful writer. Different set of skills entirely.

Lacey, I didn't detest grammar, I just didn't understand it from the way we were taught. I think from an example I saw here once in an earlier discussion, that the diagramming method was better than how we did it.

We had to write out a sentence and then mark what we thought was the correct definition above each of the words. I guessed a lot! Understanding comes from good teaching but unfortunately in large classes the teacher couldn't always help a student get to grips with a subject with which they were having trouble.

I think that it is probably better now with the internet available to explain subjects so that a student can try out various methods at home.

Lacey, my interest was taken by your description of the Wallis Simpson book. I looked it up and it is known over here as Wallis My War. I have ordered a second hand copy. It only cost a penny plus postage so, although I claim no longer to buy books I can pretend to myself that this doesn't count, plus I can hand it on to a friend when I have finished with it.

Thank goodness we never did 'diagramming' sentences and although I'm not sure what it is I just know I would have been useless at it.

OOooh.....I loved diagramming sentence ! It was so linear and logical and concrete . I thought that it was fun and always looked forward to it . Perhaps that is where my Inner Editor began.

Lacey, your knowledge of languages is quite impressive. I had 3 years of Latin, 5 years of Spanish, and 3 years of French, the latter being helped by living in France.

I am not at all sure I could diagram a sentence correctly in English anymore.

Donnemira, the book on "the Little Ice Age" sounds fascinating. I have run across this in some of my European history classes. It also badly affected the peasants in various European nations, with bad crops, starvation, etc. and led to wars.

Where in VA do you live? I lived in VA over 40 years, and before I relocated 7 years ago, lived quite close to the "Historic Triangle", so I am quite familiar with Jamestown 1607 founding, etc.

Woodnymph, I live in Fairfax County (not too far from the little church where Clara Barton administered to the wounded coming back from the Manassas battle), but I've been down to the Hampton Roads area frequently for business, as well as the usual touristy trips to Williamsburg & Jamestown. And one of my favorite tourist activities was stopping at all the James River plantations on the way home. I found a super book on gardening with native plants of the South at one of the stops.

I'm likewise impressed with everyone's knowledge of languages. I took only high-school French, and a semester of Latin in college, and barely remember any of it! I do remember learning as much grammar from my French class as from my English classes, which after 8th grade were essentially literature classes. My sister learned to diagram sentences in junior high, and I thought it looked like so much fun, so I was hugely disappointed when we moved and the new school didn't teach it.

Donnamira, great minds think alike!

I just finished Sam White's A Cold Welcome about a week ago. I've read a lot about the founding of Spanish, English, and French colonies in North America, but I don't think it had occurred to me before that Jamestown, Quebec City, and Santa Fe happened so nearly simultaneously and that they all ran into similar problems with sustaining themselves. The common factor does seem to have been climate change happening in N. America during those years,, plus the fact that Spain, England, and France all had a mistaken notion that 'climate' was equated with latitude. Andalusia was in the same latitude as Carolina, and Paris was in the same latitude as Newfoundland, so it was logical to them to expect the New World climates to be much like their own. London was far north of Virginia, so Virginia ought to be Paradise compared to England. Of course they weren't taking into account the differences between maritime and continental climates.

I enjoyed White's take on history and climatology, but I agree with you that he could have made the climate data clearer and more prominent -- perhaps in tables. He included some of these things in the narratives of the various chapters, but I had trouble keeping up with these mentions and finding them again when I wanted to scrutinize them more closely.

At the same time as I was reading A Cold Welcome, I read Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, subtitled "Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World." A blurb from Newsweek says, "Shows How Geography Shapes Not Just History But Destiny."

I have a question pertaining to the blurb that someone here might have some ideas about.

In the 1970s, geographical determinism seems to have fallen out of favor, and I recall several nasty and emotional arguments about it during classes I took at university. But I only have a vague idea about what was causing the contention. Does anyone else remember this? The pendulum of opinion now seems to be swinging the other way.

I've just finished Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans, the story of a young boy who lived with his suffragette, eccentric godmother who died just as children were being evacuated from London during WWII. He was sent to live with a wacky woman who was barely making a living through various schemes, and he was a lot better at them than she was. It was a really delightful book.

Vee, thank you again for introducing me to this author.

Carolyn. I had also never heard of her until the adverts for the film of Their Finest . . . came out. I think I enjoyed Crooked Heart more . . . and I notice she has another due in the Summer, Old Baggage about an ex suffragette, that looks promising.

Carolyn & Vee - Oh gosh, another book I want to read. I can't keep up!

Me too ! I just ordered a copy on Amazon.

I realized that I had read Memory Man so now I've started the latest book by Phillippa Gregory, The Last Tudor, about Lady Jane Grey.

Donna

Lying among my various piles of books I just came across a yellowing paperback Twenty-One Stories by Graham Green. Written between the '30's and the 50's with often 'dark' content and rather too many mentions of priests and RC religion with which GG seemed to have been almost obsessed. But elegantly and tightly written.

Typical of G. Green, Vee. I read his "The End of the Affair" and it was haunted by his emotional take on The Church. However, I do consider him to be an excellent writer. His work is still read in some colleges here as "classic."

Mary I also read The End of the Affair and found Greene's attitude to his 'affair' with someone else's wife most strange plus his obsession with confessing all. It was almost as though he carried on with the woman just for the pleasure of asking for forgiveness and being absolved.

Went into the library to pick up an ordered book, which the staff couldn't find, so on the way out took from the 'quick reads' shelf The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan. Written 40 years ago it was a very quick read of a most disturbing nature. Three adolescent children and a young brother are left parentless. Told from the p.o.v of the older boy, an unwashed, bad tempered teen who's personal habits may cause him to go blind . . . it deals with how the kids spend a hot Summer on their own in the wreckage of what was the family home. Unpleasant subject of incest which I could well have done without. I don't care how many stars in got on Amazon for its 'style'; I cannot recommend it.

I won't be reading that one, Vee.

Finished The Gatekeeper last night and began another Andrew Taylor earlier today, The Scent of Death. It is set in New York City during the Revolutionary War. The main character is British, sent to help out the with the claims of the Loyalists. He is already (two chapters in) disturbed by the treatment of captured rebels and the slaves who are handy to be blamed and hanged for crimes the government doesn't wish to pursue.

I have taken a short term leave from regular reading because of the Olympics. I am an avid figure skating fan and this year, unlike previous years, there has been excellent coverage of the figure skating events. Now that they are done, I have several library books waiting to be read. I would list the titles but the books are on a stand a few feet away, just far enough that I can't see the titles and there is a cat giving himself a bath on my lap so I (obviously! lol) can't disturb him to get to them.

Rouan, of course you can't disturb the cat! I don't follow sports at all but happened to be in a waiting area that had the ice skating on a TV and saw the Australian skater pair. Was that the kind of skating you watched?

Finally read a book I enjoyed. It was The Dry by Jane Harper, a darkish but not dreary mystery novel set in Australia during a long drought. She has a new novel out, so I think I'll try that one as well. On the whole, I am not an avid mystery reader, but I do like them now and then.

Annpan, yes that was part of it. There were several events: pairs, men's and ladie's singles, ice dance, and something called a team event. I watched them all! I think I have satisfied my figure skating viewing need for a while. :)

Another huge fan here of the skating, ice dancing, and especially the pairs. I love the brother/sister duo. What's up with little Norway taking all the medals!!!

They have lots of cold weather . . . which is being sent to the UK any time soon, with blizzards forecast for the end of the week. It is being called "The Beast from the East"

Mary, I agree about the skating and have watched the ice-dancing over the last few Olympics since Torvill and Dean received gold for their performance to Ravel's "Bolero" in 1984.

1984 Ice Dancing Final

Vee.....*sigh* , ah yes, Torvill and Dean. That was back in the era of classy routines.

Now they have to edit their presentations because there are x-rated grabs of the nether region that don't play well on prime time !!

My Goodness, yoyo, I didn't know political and social 'correctness' had gone so far. I suppose classical ballet will soon be banned.

Vee......let's just say it was obvious that she had taken advantage of the Brazilian waxing !

Eyes watering here!

Legs crossed and clenched here !

I'm nearly finished with The Last Tudor by Phillippa Gregory. It's 500+ pages, and I've enjoyed it, but IMO it could stand to be a couple hundred pages shorter. Lots of repetition.

I don't know how accurately it follows history, but apparently the late 1500s were not a good time to be in the nobility in England. :)

Donna

Earlier this week I finished Death in Brittany by Jean-Luc Bannalec, Commissaire of Police in a small town in Brittany and relocated there because of "certain disputes" with his superiors in Paris. He really is a coffee addict and keeps drinking it in charming cafes and eating in wonderful little restaurants until you want to go live there, too.

Last night I started Murder for Christmas by Francis Duncan, written in 1949 and reissued last year. There are five of these books, and I like this one enough to see if I can find all of them. Dated but interesting; set in an English village.

Interesting, that article about Francis Duncan.

I began Crooked Heart this week and loved it from the first page. I know I will enjoy this story very much. The writing is wonderful.

You can thank Vee for this author. I did like Crooked Heart better than Their Finest Hour and a Half, but I enjoyed both of them.

Started Pulse by Felix Francis today, but I'm not very far into it.