Fun fact: my
Collins Engelsk-Norsk Ordbok/English-Norwegian Dictionary has as the example sentence under the "boldly,
adv" entry:
Quote:
|
…to boldly go where no man has gone before … å gå dristig or frimodig der hvor ingen mann hadde gått før
|
While I didn't exactly buy it for that reason alone, if I'd already had a bunch of Norwegian dictionaries prior, I'd still have picked it up for sheer awesomeness just because.
Aside from that, most prescriptive grammar is incorrect and can be blamed on people with too much time on their hands and too little linguistics knowledge of how their own language actually works, who then spread it around to others such, unfortunately.
Sometimes blamed very specifically.
Prepositions not ending a sentence? That's the fault of John Dryden (
Wikipedia,
Motivated Grammar blogpost write-up), noted and influential poet and playwright whom you may know from his pithy "hostages to fortune" remark, who thought that his generation's usage of language was way cooler and would be longer-enduring than those outdated wordsmiths Shakespeare and Chaucer (ahahaha… so wrong).
Split infinitives? A
number of fingers to point, but apparently mainly the work of Henry Alford (
Wikipedia,
write-up on this from one of the co-authors of the Cambridge University Press'
A Student's Introduction to English Grammar), another poet who should have stuck to poetry instead of helping to make the Queen's English clunkier and less lyrical.
And we have Robert Lowth (
Wikipedia), another poet-ish (well, professor of poetry-ish) guy, who went and enabled them all.
Incidentally, the entire who/whom thing is because of the subject/object case distinction and it really is a real grammar rule that's descriptive, not prescriptive (except in cases of genuinely incorrect usage).
It's just that the object-only "whom" inflection has atrophied its ending in favour of becoming object-"who", but it's still an objective case ending and the misuse comes from when people mistakenly use object-"whom" when they mean subject-"who"*.
Long story short: the easy way to remember when to use whom if you want to (which incidentally I personally do, and in actual speech too, though YMMV) is in situations where you would use "him" and not "he" (and if you can't tell those apart, then I can no longer help you).
Otherwise, you can't go wrong with using object-"who" for all informal usages if you don't feel like visibly (and audibly) distinguishing it from subject-"who".
* There's actually a case descriptive word† for when the same form is used consistently for both subject and object in certain circumstances across a particular language, but that's not what's happening in the English language.
† And IIRC, it's "ergative-absolutive" (
Wikipedia), not that you actually wanted to know.