Why Samsung Galaxy S3 has horrid grammar (e.g., "Who do you want to call?")

You misspelled "colloquial".

Try getting in touch with Samsung customer service?

Mark L. Fergerson

Your suggested/preferred/"improved" version would be what, exactly?

Highly debatable.

The personal pronoun "who" follows the same rules as the personal pronoun "him".

So, it must be: "Whom do you want to call?"

Saying "Who do you want to call" sounds to everyone as ridiculous as saying "I want to call he" does.

It's amazing that this egregious error wasn't caught in the Samsung testing phase, but I guess they don't speak English in Korea so they don't even notice the horrid grammar.

I wonder if the iPhone is just as bad?

That's an archaic American provincialism. In British English it sounds just bizarre. "Whom" is essentially dead.

No it doesn't. But it is ambiguous. You don't know which way the desired call is intended to go. Perhaps Samsung's ad agency intended the ambiguity? - in context it might be a clever piece of writing. Your preferred version eliminates the alternate reading, "who do you want to call [you]?"

Are you a native speaker of English yourself? Or maybe (given the surname) you're from a place like Wisconsin where the main language was Swedish until the last couple of generations, and you've internalized Swedish grammatical rules?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------- e m a i l : j a c k @ c a m p i n . m e . u k Jack Campin, 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland mobile 07800 739 557 Twitter: JackCampin

Well not to "everyone". Probably well over 50% of US users of a cell phone would think that "Whom do you want to call" sounds pretentious. Of course, that doesn't make them "right"?. It's just that Samsung is playing to the market.

Remember, most purchasers of the S3 are probably teenagers, and teenagers listen daily to much worse grammar in their music. Are you old enough to remember the cigarette advertisement "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should"? Do you think they would have become the #1 selling brand if they'd used "as"?

If you want to sound like a pretentious prig, then go ahead and say "Whom".

OK, I guess you *do* want to sound like a pretentious prig.

-sw

Because the correct 'whom do you want to call' would sound 'weird'.

"Can the user to fix"? A third grader has better English grammar than that.

Why?

I do hope so in order that it might be corrected to: "With whom wouldst thou wisheth to share some saucy intrigue?"

I,JM

Marvellous irony! I'm convinced there is nothing bad in "Who do you want to call?". Maybe it's even more nice-looking than old archaistic "Whom" if you are not tidy ass, of course :-)

-- Mr. Pumpov

Mr Pumpov:

Me wants to know whether it is your striving for beauty or your reluctance to take increased care when writing that makes you say this.

I don't approve uncompromising ossified views on English grammar. It has rights to change.

-- Mr. Pumpov

Mr Pumpov:

Your assumption of my views' being so is plain wrong.

But my quesiton as to the reasons you approve this certain "chage" you didn't anwer.

Sorry, typo here. Should be "change".

Wherefore is this important?

There are a lot of people who (even now) excoriate Mr. Roddenberry and his group for splitting that infinitive so that people all over the English speaking world would never go boldly anywhere if they could boldly go instead, mostly because it sounded better and who the hell cares?

If you want to sound like a uneducated moron, then, go ahead: say 'who'.

You do realize that, to every educated person, 'who' not only sounds weird, but it is just horrid grammar!

I admit, I made an accidental typographic error. I apologize.

The reason for this disagreement is that in many versions of informal English "whom" is dying out. Some people never use it. That does not mean they are uneducated morons.

Many educated people do not find it sounds weird, even if they themselves would use "whom". A change in the language is taking place, and has been fro a long time.

The OED says of "whom":

The objective case of who pron.: no longer current in natural colloquial speech.

That entry in the dictionary dates from 1924.