[Footnote 135:  Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when You saw whom? is equivalent to You saw so and so and that so and so is who? In such sentences whom is pronounced high and lingeringly to emphasize the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known or recognized.]

These three conflicts—­on the score of form grouping, of rhetorical emphasis, and of order—­are supplemented by a fourth difficulty.  The emphatic whom, with its heavy build (half-long vowel followed by labial consonant), should contrast with a lightly tripping syllable immediately following.  In whom did, however, we have an involuntary retardation that makes the locution sound “clumsy.”  This clumsiness is a phonetic verdict, quite apart from the dissatisfaction due to the grammatical factors which we have analyzed.  The same prosodic objection does not apply to such parallel locutions as what did and when did.  The vowels of what and when are shorter and their final consonants melt easily into the following d, which is pronounced in the same tongue position as t and n.  Our instinct for appropriate rhythms makes it as difficult for us to feel content with whom did as for a poet to use words like dreamed and hummed in a rapid line.  Neither common feeling nor the poet’s choice need be at all conscious.  It may be that not all are equally sensitive to the rhythmic flow of speech, but it is probable that rhythm is an unconscious linguistic determinant even with those who set little store by its artistic use.  In any event the poet’s rhythms can only be a more sensitive and stylicized application of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic of the daily speech of his people.

We have discovered no less than four factors which enter into our subtle disinclination to say “Whom did you see?” The uneducated folk that says “Who did you see?” with no twinge of conscience has a more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students.  Naturally the four restraining factors do not operate independently.  Their separate energies, if we may make bold to use a mechanical concept, are “canalized” into a single force.  This force or minute embodiment of the general drift of the language is psychologically registered as a slight hesitation in using the word whom.  The hesitation is likely to be quite unconscious, though it may be readily acknowledged when attention is called to it.  The analysis is certain to be unconscious, or rather unknown, to the normal speaker.[136] How, then, can we be certain in such an analysis as we have undertaken that all of the assigned determinants are really operative and not merely some one of them?  Certainly they are not equally powerful in all cases.  Their values are variable, rising and falling according to the individual and the locution.[137] But that they really exist, each in its own right, may sometimes be tested