Whom?
Slavoj Zizek writes, in an op-ed piece in today's
New York Times (p. A17), about
Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, Iraqi information minister in the late days of
Saddam Hussein's rule:
There was something refreshingly
liberating about his interventions, which displayed a striving to be
liberated from the hold of facts and thus of the need to spin away
their unpleasant aspects: his stance was, "Whom do you believe, your
eyes or my words?"
Whom?
I would have written
which
(or maybe
what), or reworded
the whole thing: "Do you believe your eyes or my words?" or "Do you
believe what you see or what I tell you?" or something else along those
lines.
I have occasionally collected
who(
m) referring to decidedly lower
forms of life, like bacteria, usually from people who study them and
have some attachment to them. But eyes are not animate creatures,
only parts of them, and words are straightforwardly inanimate.
Who(
m) -- I'm not going to argue about
the case-marking question here -- strikes me as decidedly odd.
You can see how someone would get into using
who(
m), with
your eyes serving as one kind of
metonymy (the part standing for the whole) and
my words as another (the words
standing for the person who produces them). But it still won't
fly.
Eliminating one of the metonymies -- "Who(m) do you believe, your eyes
or me?" or maybe with
your eyes
moved away from the verb
believe,
in "Who(m) do you believe, me or your eyes?" -- improves things a bit,
but only a bit . Eliminating them both -- "Who(m) do you believe,
yourself or me?" -- alters the meaning.
Who(
m) has to go.
[Addendum: Zizek is not a native speaker of English, and so can be excused this infelicity. But the
Times has copy editors, and they haven't been shy in the past about altering copy; they should have fixed this one.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 5, 2007 10:48 AM