Whom am I speaking with?

[imperialWicket]

The winner is: With whom am I speaking?

You wouldn't say, "The car am I driving in?". And you should avoid dangling prepositions. If your sentence (or clause) ends in a preposition, it is either extraneous, or your sentence requires rewording.

[lmkg]

Terminal prepositions are poor Latin, but they are perfectly acceptable English. The prejudice against terminal prepositions (and split infinitives, as well as such abominations as the s in island) came from a period in English linguistics where a bunch of grammarians thought that English wasn't dignified enough, and tried to pretend that it was a Romance language by shoehorning the language into awkward and ungainly shapes that faintly resemble Latin. The language of Shakespeare is dignified enough for me, without the groundless prescriptivist contortions. He, like many authors since then, has found that the natural aesthetic flow of English will sometimes (not always) result in the preposition most naturally falling at the end of a clause. When that situation arises, take the opportunity to celebrate the uniqueness of your native tongue.

[cryptoz]

From the Internet somewhere:

On his first day at Harvard, a young freshman from Georgia was exploring the campus and, in his southern drawl, asked an older student: “Can you please tell me where the library is at?” The student looked down his nose and and said, in his New England accent, “At Harvard, we don’t end our sentences in a proposition.” The freshman replied. “Pardon me. Can you please tell me where the library is at, jackass?”

[tomsaffell]

Personally, I find 'dangling prepositions' fine in spoken English, because intonation can overcome their awkwardness. I try to avoid writing dangling prepositions, and I find reading them to be slightly jarring.

[Semiapies]

If you're pretending that English is a Romance language, that's a valid concern.

Alternately, just go with "Who am I talking to?"

[asdfj843lkdjs]

And you should avoid dangling prepositions.

You should avoid dangling prepositions if you are speaking in Latin. Then again if you are speaking Latin, ALL dangling prepositions will intuitively sound so wrong that you'll never make them.

If you are speaking English, they are perfectly fine. Some people a long time ago decided Latin was the bee's knees and English grammar ought to mimic Latin grammar. This is nonsense.

But you can keep up the nonsense as a way to show off your education (superior social rank).

[EliRivers]

But you might say "Which car am I driving in?"

[blahedo]

Bull. There is no credible linguist that will argue that sentence-ending prepositions are either invalid or even uncommon in English, whether spoken or written. There are some who prescribe this rule, due to nothing more than their personal aesthetic, and vilify those who violate it; but it is not a rule that competent speakers or writers of the language follow, and indeed those that propagate the so-called "rule" are typically unable to follow it consistently.

Furthermore, "the car am I driving in" is a complete red herring in this discussion; its syntactic structure is not parallel to that of the title of the post.

(My apologies to everyone else for feeding the trolls, but I can't stand to see prescriptions like this passed around as if legitimate.)

[tomjen3]

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html

[Vivtek]

I love the smell of prescriptive grammar in the morning.

[pluies]

Okay, grammatical quibbles aside, this blog post is scary.

Harvesting that much information about your customers is creepy and dangerous. I don't care that it helps your business or that it's technically feasible, it's just wrong.

[btilly]

I am puzzled at why this comment is so popular.

You have a website. With a login form. People gave you information about themselves. They are contacting you from your website which they are logged in to.

Exactly what is creepy and dangerous about having the information that they gave you knowing that it would be stored in your system be presented to you when they use your service to contact you??? Guess what, odds are that they are going to do something like ask about the status of an order that they made, and you're going to pull up the account and have information about that as well! If you can't, then you're incompetent and can't provide good customer support.

Really, I understand privacy as much as, and probably more than, the next guy. (I'm one of the rare people who cares enough about mine to have avoided Facebook.) But really, this is bog normal for what happens when you contact customer support at any competent place. Any place that doesn't have the ability to get at information like this is going to have customer support so bad that you won't want to go back.

[bcx]

I'd like to understand more of your concerns.

Olark just help website owners take the information they already have about you (and that you gave to them), and use it to provide better service.

So if your logged into a website and ask a question the operator doesn't have to ask you for your username again (the website already knows it -- why shouldn't the person helping you)

Most of this parallels what goes on in the real world. If you often shop at the same store the clerks will start to recognize you and give you more personal service -- Olark just lets small business owners do the same online.

[huhtenberg]

Definitely, that's why Olark has been firmly sitting on my AdBlock blacklist from the first time I ran into them.

[hippo33]

That's pretty neat -- sounds really useful for trying to better address a customer.

[steverb]

I can't decide if the "Whom" in the title is a troll or not. At least the article gets it right.

[tspiteri]

How does the article get it right? If the answer can be "him", the question should be "whom", and if the answer can be "he", the question should be "who". Having said that, "Whom am I speaking with?" does sound pretty weird, "With whom am I speaking?" sounds much better.

[hung]

I can't decide if this comment is a troll or not. "Whom" is grammatically correct.