The Christian Science Monitor

The waning use of the word ‘whom’

I studied abroad in Austria when I was in college, and sometimes I like to listen to the Austrian Top 40 to hear some German. Recently a pop-rap song came on called “Pass auf, wen Du Liebst” (“Be careful whom you love”). “That’s grammatically correct!”, the English equivalent of . There are more than a dozen songs with the title “Who do you love?” and nary a one using what grammarians would say is the proper form of the pronoun. Do German rappers have better grammar? What do we have against ?

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