A World Without "Whom"

Sigh. Linguistic nonfiction is my literary security blanket. I've read pretty much every pop linguistics nonfiction book out there and enjoyed them all. But not this one!

Emmy Favilla seems to have no sense of who her audience is: she veers wildly between offering highly specific advice for those developing a style guide for heavily perused blogs and pedantically defining “prescriptivism.” No sooner does she tell people to follow their own instincts than she derides those whose instincts include “whom.” She comes off as pretentious, self-important and judgey. My biggest problem with the book is that I didn't like her. But I didn't like the book either: without much central structure, it wanders through half-hearted odes to descriptivist language use, punctuated with screenshots of the author's slack chats and buzzfeed articles.

Because Internet covered many of the same topics more comprehensively and was much more fun to read.