User talk:GrammarEditingGuy

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Hello, GrammarEditingGuy, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! DBaK (talk) 07:45, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Who and whom

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia, and thank you for your edits. I'm sorry but I think that some of your edits are hypercorrections - they were right before and you've changed them to something wrong. The Dam Busters film one is an example, and I've referred to it in a couple of edit summaries on others which I have reverted. I thanked you, and am doing so again now, for this edit in which you went back to the correct form. I am usually a great supporter of whom but not in these instances.

I'm happy to discuss this, especially if you want to bring sources to support your position. I will do so also if you want to debate it, and if I am proven wrong then I promise I that will apologize most prettily and stfu, as I gather the young people charmingly put it! But to be honest I think, just in terms of seat-of-the-pants grammar, and saying the bits of the sentence before putting them together, that I am probably, but not guaranteed to be, correct. (Being absolutely certain that you are right is very often the enemy of good editing on Wikipedia so I am very willing to listen.) There are also other editors around, much more experienced than I, who are considered experts in grammar and to whom we could go for a third opinion. I've done this before with mostly reasonable results.

It's only this who/whom aspect of your edits with which I have a problem - your other stuff has been great and it is always good to have new editors on board. Thanks and best wishes DBaK (talk) 07:56, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

From GrammerEditingGuy:

No problem, and thanks for the comments. I may be wrong about those. I consulted some pages which suggest that who (whom) is usually used when one is referring to a subject (object) and provide some heuristics for recognising these in sentences. However, even so, those pages seem to deal with simple situations. I have seen a few which don't fit these patterns and it's not entirely clear which one to use. This is typically when there is no verb indicating who is taking (or took) an action and who is having something done to them. In many of these cases one could form an interesting argument either way about how passive the person/people that are being referred to are in the process.

To be honest, I was just having some fun in writing a script to scan lots of pages for things which other websites had mentioned as common grammatical errors. My script is quite primitive though so I still had to visually inspect the sentence. I'll look to do some more complex regex exercises to filter the situations that I'm interested in and provide enough certainty about the context.

When I read random pages I notice manually many ways to more accurately say what I think the writer meant. So I might focus on ways to clean these up, rather than on minor grammatical issues :)

Thanks very much for the courteous and helpful response. Yup, it's a right old minefield! Happy editing and best wishes DBaK (talk) 16:19, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]