Whom I guessed to be she

Question

Two sentences:1. I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be she whom I had come to meet.2. It is not likely that other and inferior works were done at the same time by an impostor pretending to be he.No need to explain anything about IT IS I/ME, which I believe myself knowledgeable about. For the two sentences, I think SHE and HE are absolutely, though potentially pedantic, correct English, because as long as the verb is copula BE, the complement, not object, must be in the nominative case; but Mr Fowler doesn't agree and says 'but it is not TO BE that decides the case of HE and SHE; it is WHOM and IMPOSTOR, and HER and HIM must be substituted'. I don't think he is correct, but what do other native English speakers think?

Enoon · Accepted Answer

The infinitive is not copulative. The verb "be" in any form is not always copulative, by the way (I think, therefore I am.). Fowler is right.

Fivejedjon · Answer

Johnson131. I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be she whom I had come to meet.

I don't think you'll find many native speakers worrying about the she/her problem here. Few of us would write, and fewer say, a stiled sentence like that.

Johnson13I think SHE and HE are absolutely, though potentially pedantic, correct English

In cases such as this, there is no 'absolutely correct' English. There are simply degrees of acceptability.

Enoon · Answer

fivejedjonIn cases such as this, there is no 'absolutely correct' English. There are simply degrees of acceptability.

I think that is always true, but there are also register and audience to consider. I don't need Fowler to tell me that there is something wrong with "she" in "I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be she whom I had come to meet." It jars. It sounds a clinker grammatically, and that makes it wrong for an audience of people like me, who expect reading to go smoothly and expect such a stilted sentence especially to be beyond reproach grammatically.

Fivejedjon · Answer

enoon I don't need Fowler to tell me that there is something wrong with "she" in "I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be she whom I had come to meet." It jars.

I think quite a few people would not find this very smooth: "I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be her whom I had come to meet."

Johnson13 · Answer

enoon fivejedjonIn cases such as this, there is no 'absolutely correct' English. There are simply degrees of acceptability.I think that is always true, but there are also register and audience to consider. I don't need Fowler to tell me that there is something wrong with "she" in "I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be she whom I had come to meet." It jars. It sounds a clinker grammatically, and that makes it wrong for an audience of people like me, who expect reading to go smoothly and expect such a stilted sentence especially to be beyond reproach grammatically.

Thanks.

Does the red word mean the level and style of a piece of writing or speech, that is usually appropriate to the situation that it is used in?

Enoon · Answer

Right, like formal and informal. One kind of language for a UN address, another in a letter to your 10-year-old niece.

Grammarfreak · Answer

enoon"I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be she whom I had come to meet."

From a practical and sound perspective, not only this one has the effect of "fingers on the black board", but it is also wrong suntactically in my opinion. "whom" is such an awkward word to me that I don't remember the last time I had used it, let alone using it twice in the same breath. Also, .." gazing about somewhat open-mouthed and confused " is a particple (adverbial) phrase modifying "girl" which I thought should be placed at the end of the sentence as posted originally . From a semantic and grammar point of view, if we must use the relative pronoun (whom), we need to be careful not to cause any syntactic and grammatical fumbling in the effort. To avoid the using two "whoms" in the same clause, I would reword it this way: I saw a girl, whom I guessed was the one I had come to meet, gazing about looking somewaht open-mouthed and confused....

enoonIt sounds a clinker grammatically, and that makes it wrong for an audience of people like me, who expect reading to go smoothly and expect such a stilted sentence especially to be beyond reproach grammatically

Helena Pechackova · Answer

Well, I am not a native speaker... but to me "she" in that sentence sounds strange, I would use "the one" as in: I saw a young girl gazing about, somewhat open-mouthed and confused, whom I guessed to be the one I had come to meet.

and in the second, I would probably write "pretending to be him."

but don't ask me why

Anonymous · Answer

and you would not place " somewhat open-mouthed and confused, " using only commas before 'whom' anyway.  Whom has to refer directly to its subject. Time to re-write the whole sentence.

Enoon · Answer

You're missing the point. The sentence is a quotation being used in a book about grammar to illustrate a fine point about the case of the personal pronoun in settings of that type. It is what it is and must be analyzed as it stands. The book was written about a hundred years ago, and the quotation sounds even older than that. It is the kind of sentence you might find in Doyle or even Swift as regards its intricacy and what looks to us today like ultra-correctness with the whoms. Of course it would be ridiculous by today's standards, but we have to be able to read the older writing, too.

Whom I guessed to be she

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