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Anonymous
01:50
> On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Andi Mack's world is turned upside down when she discovers that whom she believed to be her sister, Bex, is actually her mother.
Anonymous
From Wikipedia.
Anonymous
Whom there sounds actually ungrammatical to me, not just clunky or overformal.
userr2684291
userr2684291
09:59
@snailboat If the sentence were ...when she discovers that Bex, whom she believed to be her sister, is actually..., would the whom still sound ungrammatical to you?
userr2684291
userr2684291
10:16
I mean, it shouldn't make any difference, but still. I'm fine with who, but there's an obvious discord, by my lights, between the declarative I believed her to be my sister and the interrogative Who did I believe to be my sister?.
Idiom of the day: in the family way
2
I asked some of my anglophone friends whether they recognize it, and none of them do. So... yeah, clearly a very useful one.
userr2684291
userr2684291
10:34
The ODE gives this example: teens who want to get it on without getting in the family way, lol. I can imagine someone misunderstanding this after a desultory read.
 
2 hours later…
SamBC
SamBC
12:50
@snailboat It really shouldn't be who or whom, because there's a lack of an actual noun or appropriate pronoun, nor is there the right setup for it being a distinct phrase. It could be "the woman whom she believed to be her sister", but then it could be "the woman she believed to be her sister".
@userr2684291 Especially a non-native speaker, yes. But "in the family way" is British, I think. It is also very old fashioned.
userr2684291
userr2684291
13:14
Right. It does sound old-fashioned. If I were going for poetic and old-fashioned I'd say with child.
ColleenV
ColleenV
13:25
@userr2684291 I think that's fine - maybe it was a case of a mistake creeping in after rewording.
@userr2684291 I usually hear it with the indefinite article "in a family way" but I guess it can be either.
From the N-grams it looks the "the family way" is more modern, but doesn't seem to be chiefly BrE or AmE.
Most of what I saw in a quick sample of modern texts was that it was a "cute" or attention-getting way to say "pregnant" for the title of a book
userr2684291
userr2684291
Looks like you're right. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/family%20way says, literally "used with in and the or a".
 
2 hours later…
SamBC
SamBC
15:20
"the family way" is more usual in my (British) experience.
"with child" seems even more old-fashioned, and more formal.
It kinda feels like some people downvote everything they have a niggling disagreement with...
New Meta Question
New Meta Question
16:11
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Q: Q: What's a word that describes ... ? Are they asking for an Adjective or Noun?

chasly from UKConsider the following question (invented by me by way of example): Question: What is a word describing a person who is very, very clever? Answer1: A genius Answer2: brilliant Clearly Answer1 is a noun and Answer2 is an adjective. I have observed this confusion over and over ag...

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