Advanced
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SIEG ZEON, dood!
Liberal Arts Major
m i doin dis rite
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
It's "whoever" in that position. And in any position, actually.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Advanced
I should have known it would be you!
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SIEG ZEON, dood!
Liberal Arts Major
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
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"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
(1) *Who do I ask?
is ungrammatical and propose
(2) Whom do I ask?
as an alternative. This is a rule based on the case checking, i.e., presumably who(m) originated in an object position relative to ask and therefore (1) is ungrammatical because it's in the wrong case.
The prescriptive recommendation is based on an arbitrary favoring of the existence of whom in every dialect of English. A descriptive view only notes that the word exists in some dialects and notes that, in those dialects, it turns up universally as an accusative inflection of who. This is then the descriptive standard for grammaticality: in other words, would a native speaker of a dialect of English, without over-thinking it, ever say (1)? And of course, descriptive linguistics would point out that (1) is perfectly acceptable for just about every speaker of English and therefore is probably grammatical, appearing in free variation with (2).
However, (1)-(2) don't actually represent the immediate problem and it turns out the topic title is ungrammatical in both prescriptive and descriptive linguistics, as it features whomever as a subject, requiring the nominative case form - who. There is not a single native speaker of English or English PhD in existence who would say the topic title without thinking, "Wait a second...!"
So correcting it is perfectly natural from the point of view of a linguist (that point of view being descriptive linguistics). The correction merely observes that the phenomenon in question is inconsistent with the standards for grammaticality of most native speakers of the particular language. It would be a correction purely of English, i.e. a prescriptive correction, if the phenomenon patterned after (1)-(2), as there is no attested linguistic basis for that claim.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
DSB Moderator
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"In the best relationships, nobody wears the pants."
Liberal Arts Major
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Advanced
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"But friends, i ask you. What is a GameCobra? From where does it come? Who are it's people?" - A Random Day on World of Warcraft