This seems to happen every time I go to my local bagel shop. Everyone is waiting in a line, and when the cashier is ready to help the next person, he/she asks, "Can I help who's next?" or "May I help who's next?" This seems wrong to me, shouldn't it be "Can I help whomever is next?" or "May I help whomever is next?"
Word Choice – How to Properly Use ‘Can I Help Who’s Next?’
grammaticalitypronounsword-choice
Related Solutions
You find both accusative pronouns (me/him/her/them) and nominative pronouns (I/he/she/they) in this syntactic position in standard English. The forms with the nominal genitive pronouns (mine/yours/hers etc.) are a red herring because they stand for something possessed rather than the person themself.
The traditional rule for comparison with a person is that you must use nominative. However, according to my research, accusative is more common.
I searched the Corpus of Contemporary American English for this syntactic structure, followed by a comma or a period to ensure we are not looking for cases like faster than he is, with a verb following the pronoun, in which case nominative is obligatory.
There were 1046 results for the accusative pronouns and 450 for nominative pronouns, more than 2 to 1 in favor of accusative pronouns—the “traditionally wrong” form. Both forms are standard, so my advice to a writer choosing between these forms is to consider that the “traditionally correct” form is unimpeachably correct but a bit formal. Choose the form that best matches tone and formality level of your writing.
For the curious, the queries looked like this:
[jjr*] than me|him|her|us|them .|,
[jjr*] than I|he|she|we|they .|,
where[jjr*]
means any comparative adjective.
Update 2011-05-23
Using the new Google Book Corpus search, I was able to construct a Google ngrams-like graph comparing these usages over time, using these two queries: accusative, nominative:
As you can see, until the late 1980s, the formal usage was more common than the informal usage. Since then, however, accusative has very rapidly eclipsed nominative, even in this corpus, which represents professionally published works.
Though she is eccentric, she deserves to be respected.
In this sentence, though does not equal however, and you will change the intrinsic meaning of the sentence if forced to place however at the beginning. It means despite the fact that, even if, in spite of the fact that, etc., and emphasizes she is.
Even if she is eccentric, she deserves to be respected.
To make however express a meaning similar to though, it rightly belongs in the second clause, as you stated:
She is eccentric; however, she deserves to be respected.
Even here, there is a subtle emphasis shift from eccentricity to respect.
To have an equivalent sentence, you need more than however:
However, she deserves to be respected even if she is eccentric/despite her eccentricity.
You'll see a seeming redundancy in that construction, because however has now become merely a conjunction, which is not the function of though in the original sentence.
It's my opinion that you can't make two perfectly equivalent sentences given the constraints placed upon you.
Best Answer
This construction is indeed peculiar. Contrary to what one of the other answers seduces us to believe, it actually is not quite analogous to "I know who shot him" and the like. Geoff Pullum over at Language Log explains why:
Emphasis added.
So why did this construction survive in some places? And in which? Geoff Pullum initially observed it in Rockport, Massachusetts. He later adds, "Lots of people have now written to me to confirm hearing or using the expression in coffee shops, bookstores [...], up to about fifteen years ago [that is, around 1990], especially in the upper Midwest, which could be the cradle of the phrase." At the same time, M. Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language fame has been hearing it "a lot in shops and cafés in Brighton". She picks the ball up from where Pullum left it and entertains some theories.