Who you callin' ungrammatical?

WHOM IS disappearing from the English language, usage writers have been saying for more than a century--but it isn't gone yet. And one of its defenders has e-mailed to protest a headline in last week's Ideas section that read, ''Who are you calling working class?"

So, it should have been ''Whom are you calling working class?" Not in this universe. ''Beginning a question with whom in contemporary standard English would not just be unusual, it would be bizarre," says linguist Geoffrey Pullum, coauthor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. ''Insisting on whom, as some people still do when writing for print, is more and more looking like an affectation," says Pullum, who's currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge.

You may still say, if you like, ''Whom are you calling a pedant?" (You know the answer.) But it would have been ridiculous to use whom in our headline, which is a variation on a well-known and well-aged expression. (Characters in Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, and George Bernard Shaw, among others, say things like ''Who are you calling a child?")

Use a different headline, then? Avoidance is the first refuge of the grammatically insecure, but it seems feeble to dump a good headline because of a bad rule. James Kilpatrick, the language columnist, admits that his ''pusillanimous tendency," when confronted with the who/whom choice, ''is to write around the booby trap." But at least he knows he's chickening out.

The New York Times, on the other hand, presents its conservatism as courtesy: It follows the ''traditional" rule, says its stylebook, ''in deference to a grammar-conscious readership and a large classroom circulation." (Translation: We don't want bags of mail from Miss Thistlebottom's sixth-grade class.) The AP and Globe stylebooks simply ignore reality and repeat that who is always a subject, never an object.

But grammarians and usage writers have always known that isn't true. In 1921 H.L. Mencken, in ''The American Language" (1921), observed that the initial whom had all but disappeared from everyday speech. H.W. Fowler, in the 1926 Modern English Usage, said that was fine; ''no further defence than 'colloquial' is needed." Theodore Bernstein, the Times's mid-century language maven, predicted in 1977 that who would ''completely displace whom standing at the head of a sentence or clause."

Nor is the usage new; it's our worry about it that's recent, according to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Shakespeare was happy to write ''Who wouldst thou strike?" and ''Between who?" when it sounded right to him.

''What sets us apart from Shakespeare is greater self-consciousness," says M-W; ''the 18th-century grammarians have intervened," forcing us to fret over our whos and whoms.

At least in the case of initial who we've made our collective decision. ''Who are you calling illiterate?" is standard English. When it comes to who and whom mid-sentence, however, usage is in flux, with whoms and whomevers muscling in where they don't belong.

Reader Ann Eldridge recently sent along an example of an erroneous whom from a New Yorker piece by Louis Menand: ''the pact bound to her for life a man whom she knew could never be faithful." John Hough Jr., spotted another in a recent Globe article: ''[We must ensure] that government surveillance is never used against the political enemies of whomever is in power." This ''hypercorrect" whom ''is the blind spot of literate Americans," he says.

But there's a reason for that: The right word isn't always obvious. Two very similar sentences may call for different pronouns: ''The captive, who they decided should be held for ransom, escaped" is correct; so is ''The captive, whom they decided to hold for ransom, escaped." When the pronoun is deeply buried, even a champion diagrammer won't always see instantly which case is called for.

And the confusion is worsening, says Pullum, as whom heads off to join thou and ye in pronoun heaven. The current usage situation is ''devilishly complex," he wrote in a 2004 post at the linguistics blog Language Log (www.languagelog.org). ''At least one linguist has decided there is no correct description of it at all."

So when Hough asks for help with the hypercorrect whom--"Can we make a start in stamping it out?"--I'm afraid the answer is, I doubt it. When Louis Menand and the New Yorker can get a pronoun wrong, anybody can get it wrong.

E-mail freeman@globe.com. For four weeks' of The Word, visit boston.com/news/globe/ideas/freeman.