Sir Joe, can you enlighten me on the use of what and whom? I am confused with your sentence “What I’m referring to is my fellow writers and myself.”Why not use whom instead of what?
Thanks.
In informal conversations, someone still unsure of something he or she is seeing in perhaps a poorly lighted street may make such a general remark as this: “There seems to be something coming our way.” The speaker still doesn’t know whether that something is a human being, an animal, a vehicle, maybe even a ghost—whatever. And on hearing such a statement, the listener will probably ask for clarification by asking this question: “
What are you referring to?” Assuming that by this time, it has already become clear to the first speaker that what’s coming are actually two people that both of them know, the first speaker will likely give this answer: “Oh,
what I was referring to
is actually George and Tina. I can see them clearly now under the lamppost.”
In such situations, the listener at first still doesn’t know the nature of the thing that’s coming, so he or she normally would use the generic “what” as the default relative pronoun. The listener could use “who” or “whom” only if he or she is sure that what the first speaker is referring to is human, so the question that the listener would normally ask takes the generic “what”: “
What are you referring to?” To ask “
Who are you referring to?” or “
Whom are you referring to?” would be very unnatural and unlikely and unidiomatic basides.
Now, to answer your second question: Why shouldn’t the first speaker use “whom” instead of “what” in this remark: “Oh,
what I was referring to is actually George and Tina. I can see them clearly now under the lamppost.” Specifically, why not say: “Oh,
whom I was referring to is actually George and Tina. I can see them clearly now under the lamppost”?
Again, the use of “whom” here is very unlikely because it’s a very unnatural change in grammatical case that’s not really worth a bother in such spur-of-the-moment situations, and it’s also not idiomatic—meaning that it’s not the natural way people say things. In fact, although “whom”-constructions in such situations are doubtless a mark of educated English, the problem is that the usage sounds too stiff and formal, and they perform even more badly when spoken. We thus can say that in such situations, the shift from “what” to “who” to “whom” is a most undesirable jump from the semantic frying pan to the fire, so to speak.
Finally, why use the singular “is” instead of the plural “are” in the remark “Oh,
what I was referring to
is actually George and Tina”? This requires a very long and extensive grammatical explanation that I won’t be able to give here; in the meantime, you may just take my word for it that the use of “is” is justified in such constructions.
(For a fuller understanding of the admittedly bewildering usage of “that,” “what,” “who,” and “whom,” my new book
Give Your English the Winning Edge extensively discusses them in Chapters 105-108.)
