Tag Archives: ungrammatical

When getting it right is just, well, wrong

Just came across this on a forum:

“Took me a while to realize to whom she was referring.”

Note the way the writer has correctly used ‘whom’, and avoided having a ‘to’ hanging off the end of the sentence. Note also how horribly strangled and self-consciously/distractingly ‘correct’ it sounds. How about:

“Took me a while to realize who she was referring to.”

Note how ungrammatical it is. Note also how much better it reads; more particularly, how it says what it wants to say without the grammar getting in the way.

Which is kind of the point, isn’t it?