I understand the concept of using the he/him rule for who/whom (he = who, him = whom), but I am not sure about how to go about the following sentence for an art project:
All who can understand and accept that are welcome.
or
All whom can understand and accept that are welcome.
In practice, we often don't use whom much in conversation or even writing anymore. Technically, whom is simply the objective form of who. Who should always be the subject. If you can rewrite a sentence in a way that makes who a direct object, for example, then it should be whom.
"All who can understand and accept that are welcome" is correct, because the subject is all and who, as a relative pronoun, modifies that subject. "All whom I could not understand" is correct, too, because I could mentally rewrite it as "I could not understand all (of them) whom..." In this case, the subject is I and the direct object is all, so the relative clause in that case is also an object. Does that make sense?
Most English speakers don't know the difference and will tend to use who in most cases. Whom can sometimes even seem like an affectation, especially if it's used incorrectly (which is often, and is similar to pronouncing the word often as off-ten).
Thanks, high school Latin class.
