That table with the uneven legs has been in my family for decades. Then again, you could always take my favorite approach to grammatical conundrums, and rewrite the sentence completely to avoid the issue entirely: That table, the legs of which are uneven, has been in my family for decades. That table, whose legs are uneven, has been in my family for decades. That might work in some cases, but for the most part, it just sounds stilted and awkward and unnecessarily formal. So what do we do to resolve this apparent tension? Some have suggested replacing “whose” with the even less user-friendly “of which”. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says the eighteenth century was when grammar nitpickers started to cast aspersions on “whose” and inanimate objects, which basically means that we as casual linguists will never be content with what we have. We've talked about the fact that the English language is always changing and evolving, but this particular piece of usage hasn't evolved since the fourteenth century. “Whose” sounds most natural when it's used for animate objects, like people and animals, and other things that breathe and possess the life force.Īpparently there are folks out there who share the opinion that “whose” for inanimate objects shouldn't be used because it sounds weird.īut think about it: what else are we going to use? Whose Has ALWAYS Been Used for Inanimate Objects It sounds so weird when you use the phrase like, “I placed the iPhone whose screen is broken in the bin,” but it's technically grammatically correct. Today, Joe brought my attention to a strange quirk of the English language: we use “whose” for inanimate objects.
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