The bell tolls for whom

Tracee Hamilton: "You're upset about the Tiger Woods scandal, and I'm here to tell you whom to blame for that: Yourself."

Yes, "whom" is the grammatical choice. No object is more an object than the object of blame. But would you go for "who" anyway? Is that the word you expected to find there?

This isn't just a modern quirk. In the New York Times' online article archive, "tell you who to" beats "tell you whom to" by a count of 29-9 going back to 1851. In the Washington Post archive, going back to 1877, "tell you who to" wins 21-10. On Google, an unscientific search of a hopelessly broad spectrum shows roughly a 9-to-1 advantage for "tell you who to." That ratio holds up even after you take the Isley Brothers out of the equation.

I don't know that "tell you who to [verb]" could ever be strictly grammatical, considering "you," the subject, will be doing "[verb]" to "who," the object. But that distinction is losing its relevance. And, frankly, meh. Sometimes it seems like the last mission of "whom" is to remind us what subjects and objects are.

Toby Flenderson can have the last word (there's video; scroll down).