Please, please, this is supposed to be a happy presidency!
It’s “who child-raped whom.”🙄
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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I know but the original quote is who killed who, so figured accuracy beats grammar.
Probably deliberate as he has a Yorkshire accent, associated with working-class people.
Absolutely deliberate. Monty Python was mostly Oxford and Cambridge grads who darn well knew how to use whom.
"Whom" is on its way out because there is no loss of understanding whatsoever if you just say "who" instead.
I don't think dropping a single letter from a word qualifies for this meme.
It's the same idea, we understand exactly what he's saying, 0 impairment of understanding etc.
There's no reason for a lot of stuff; why do verbs like have and be require different conjugations when the subject is in the sentence? Why bother pluralizing words when we can usually figure it out from context etc.
Yup, you're right. This particular word is especially egregious, though. It's a holdover from Old English, and the fact that it conveys absolutely no extra information when used instead of who shows that.
To each their own!
I personally think English sounds better when spoken well and enjoy doing so. "For Who the Bell Tolls" sounds silly and I think people missing whom tend to sound similarly silly.
Yes, I definitely see the appeal of legacy titles and phrases keeping the original words. It's like how "To thine own self be true" sounds nicer than "Be true to yourself." Doesn't mean I want to use "thine" in everyday speech, though.
After all, that book title is from archaic English: "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." It's telling that that's the first thing you thought of.
"Of which you thought." - I also enjoy not ending sentences with prepositions.
Again, I just think it makes everyday language better. Similar to having art on one's walls, doesn't improve anything other than aesthetics but that's enough to make it worthwhile to some.
I also would never use "k" instead of okay in a text but to each their own!
"Chief, you know that guy whose camper they were whacking off in?"
"Bork, you're a Federal Agent. You represent the United States government. Never end a sentence with a preposition!"
"Oh, uh... You know that guy in whose camper they... I mean, that guy off in whose camper they were whacking?"
So you like to use formal English at all times; that's fine. All I'm saying is that language changes over time, and that change isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes it gets rid of needless complexity. However, things like "literally" meaning "figuratively," its complete opposite, I absolutely hate because it takes away from the usefulness of the word. I won't mourn "whom" any more than "thou," though.
I don't know if I'd call it formal (to me, formal means using sir, more conditionals and more emphasis on manners) so much as I enjoy speaking grammatically, the same way I like to use idiosyncratic words, all fun stuff that makes language more interesting. Yes, plain English, unencumbered by whom or unnecessarily large words is more simple but it is also less joyful. (In my cynical way, I wonder if I'll see textbooks with "k" instead of okay in my lifetime.)
Fully agree on literally (in part, Dave Cross broke me on that one years ago. "When you misuse that word, you are using it exactly incorrectly.") The other one that bugs me is nonplussed, which is becoming to mean its opposite to the point where if it's used it pretty much has no meaning because you have no way of knowing whether the speaker knows it actually means bewildered/startled or if they're using it incorrectly to mean the exact opposite.
says whom???
It's still used in formal speech and writing, but everyday use has been steadily declining. Even as something of a stickler for grammar, I find it rather pointless.
the end of punctuation, proofreading, grammar…it’s the end of everything!!!
When GHWBush got busted for boinking a Japanese hoochie he said "let's not play the gotcha game". It worked then too.
I think it was the boinking of a Japanese hoochie. It may have been negotiating the detention of American hostages until after the 1980 election. Or maybe it was the Iran-Contra thing. I forget. And it was long enough ago that our newly-enshittified search engines have no idea what I'm talking about either.
Wait untill you learn about how HW was in Dallas the day JFK was assasinated, placed a misleading/red herring 'tip' call to the FBI, and in every subsequent interview in all of his life, couldn't remember exactly where he was or what he did that day... a day that, like 9/11, basically everyone who was older than maybe 10ish remembers in decent detail where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news.
Oh did I mention that prior to that, his import/export/offshore drilling company in the Gulf of Mexico was used to funnel arms to the group that would do the Bay of Pigs Invasion?
https://headlineusa.com/records-implicate-george-h-w-bush-in-the-assassination-of-jfk/
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bush_Sr,_JFK_-_J_Edgar_Hoover_memo_2.jpg
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/11/us/63-fbi-memo-ties-bush-to-intelligence-agency.html
Entirely seriously: George HW Bush was substantially involved in the assasination of JFK.
Also worth mentioning:
HW's dad, Prescott Bush... yeah, he ran a bank that got shut down during WW2 for laundering money to the actual Nazis.
Prescott Bush literally financed the Nazi party's rise to power.
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/how-bushs-grandfather-helped-hitlers-rise-to-power
Original outlet that broke the story in modern times:
https://www.nhgazette.com/the-bushnazi-stories/bushnazi-link-confirmed/
Somewhat hilariously, even Fox News reported on this.
As did Haaretz:
Heh heh heh. True.
He also told Jimmy Carter if he couldn’t be CIA director for life, he wasn’t going to tell him about the UFOs.
Source: Jimmy Carter
Prescott was also involved in the plotted Nazi coup (of the US the "businessman's coup") iirc, oh and didn't he found the CIA ?
I had heard about the first part there... not the second part.
But uh yeah that sounds about right.
So basically, Smedley Butler's 'War is a Racket' was functionally written about Prescott Bush and people like him?
Sounds like it.
Are you sure about that? He did have an affair with a staffer, but she was blonde. The only Japanese thing he was famous for was puking on some Japanese people in a meeting.
Y’know this sounds weird, but in 1992 there wasn’t much of an Internet so I can’t find the story - I want to say I read it in print form, but I honestly don’t remember. There were a bunch of “groping” incidents, but this wasn’t that.
Just because aol.com didn't exist in 1992 doesn't mean that it's impossible to do research into things that happened before 1992.
For one thing, there are archives of newspapers going back into the 1800s. For example, here's the NY Times from 1865, from the US Library of Congress. Or you can look at the NY Times' own archive for things like Bush Collapsing at a Japanese State Dinner
For another, books exist. People read books, and sometimes excerpts from those books are posted online. That's how you have Wikipedia entries for presidents who died before 1992. It's also how you get all kinds of articles like 14 Presidents who Cheated on their First Lady or Historic Presidential Affairs That Never Made it To the Tabloids or 9 US presidents who faced sex scandals before, during, or after their time in office.
Note that those articles do include George HW Bush, but they don't mention a Japanese person. Instead they talk about Jennifer Fitzgerald. Maybe you got the country wrong, because she was working with him while he was "Chief of US Liaison Office to the People’s Republic of China". So, she was a white, American woman but the affair would have been ongoing while he was in Asia.
To me, it seems more likely that you have a faulty memory, than that the world remembers lots of US presidents having lots of affairs, including George HW Bush, but that for some reason they've censored one particular affair of his.
the important thing to remember here is that George HW Bush is dead
Yeah I appreciate that items earlier than 1992 can be accessed via the interwebs but it's not the same as a standard search. And I don't want to spend that much time on it.
It's possible it's a faulty memory but i don't think so. (I did misremember something about Gee Dubz once and mistakenly attributed it ~~to his Poppy~~ it was actually misattributed to Trump - I was thinking about when Gee Dubz gave Merkel a shoulder rub and she was all like - "MF you better be having a seizure right now" - but not this one.)
It wasn't in the 70s, this was some 80s thing, and I thought the woman was Japanese but there I might be mixing it up with the Prime Minister barfing incident. She was not Western though.
Third term for the rapist. Yay