it difficult, for at once the learned authors cite blunder in the writings of Richardson, Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and even Henry Sweet, author of the best existing grammar of the English language. In American the distinction is almost lost. No ordinary American, save after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in this sentence from the London Times, denounced as corrupt by the Fowlers: "We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can do." Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: "The character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth… and yet we will rejoice in every happiness that comes to him." Half a century ago, impatient of the effort to fasten the English distinction upon American, George P. Marsh attacked it as of "no logical value or significance whatever," and predicted that "at no very distant day this verbal quibble will disappear, and one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other only as an expression of purpose or authority."[1] This prophecy has been substantially verified. Will is sound American "with all persons of the nominative," and shall is almost invariably an "expression of purpose or authority."[2]
And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with who and whom. Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that whom is being neglected, and so it is trotted out,[3] but in the
- ↑ Quoted by White, in Words and Their Uses, pp. 264-5. White, however, dissented vigorously and devoted 10 pages to explaining the difference between the two auxiliaries. Most of the other authorities of the time were also against Marsh for example, Richard Meade Bache (See his Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, p. 92 et seq.) . Sir Edmund Head, governor-general of Canada from 1854 to 1861, wrote a whole book upon the subject: Shall and Will, or Two Chapters on Future Auxiliary Verbs; London, 1856.
- ↑ The probable influence of Irish immigration upon the American usage is not to be overlooked. Joyce says flatly (English As We Speak It In Ireland, p. 77) that, "like many another Irish idiom this is also found in American society chiefly through the influence of the Irish." At all events, the Irish example must have reinforced it. In Ireland "Will I light the fire, ma'am?" is colloquially sound.
- ↑ Often with such amusing results as "whom is your father?" and "whom spoke to me?" The exposure of excesses of that sort always attracts the wits, especially Franklin P. Adams.
