The proper use of who and whom is something that I feel just about everyone out there is confused about.  I even admit that I used to be confused about it myself!  But it used to be that people simply avoided the word whom, using only who when one of the two words was needed (probably in an effort to avoid sounding pompous).  This was my practical solution to avoid improper usage when I didn't understand it myself, because it seemed to me that you could more effectively escape improper usage if you just didn't use the troublesome word.  However, lately I've noticed that people are using whom for everything in an effort to sound "smarter," and as a result, the world is filled with really obvious misuses that just make the misuser look like a total douche.

But all douchiness aside, the who vs. whom question is still valid for those of us who aren't attempting to look smarter but rather attempting not to look more stupid.  Like a lot of things in English grammar, there is a simple trick to help you decide when it's proper to use whom.  It's called the He/Him Method (now the owls make sense!).  

If you're going to ask a question/say a sentence that contains the word who or whom, the best way to determine which is proper is to rephrase the question/sentence into a sentence that uses the word he or him in place of the word who or whom.  If the rephrased sentence makes more sense with the word he, the proper word to use is who; if the new sentence makes more sense with him, the proper word is whom.  Simply put, he = who, him = whom.  Here are some examples : 

Who/whom would like to go to the store for me?

He/him would like to go to the store for me.

For who/whom are you buying that present?

Are you buying that present for he/him?

We know who/whom committed the crime.

He/him committed the crime.

We know against who/whom the crime was committed.

The crime was committed against he/him.

Now that you understand the trick, here's the technical rules of it: use whom when referring to the object of a verb, and use who when referring to the subject of a sentence or phrase.  It's the same rule that applies to he/him usage, which is what makes this so simple, despite the fact that it always used to seem so hard!

Do you have any grammar questions you'd like me to answer in a future post?  Just pop me a comment, and I'd be happy to help!