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“Most of which” or “most of whom”?

The following is a sentence from an email I recently sent, not knowing if it was the proper use of the word.

As I mentioned, I have two (2) clients in the OMAHA area for whom I have been moving freight for about 16 months.

My question is whether I should have used "for which" instead of "for whom".

I make every effort to use my native language properly, but I am often unsure of the proper use of some of these words.

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Jay Sigal
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Noting this chart comparing "clients for whom" against "clients for which"...

enter image description here

...I think it's fair to say "whom" is the preferred word with "human" referents such as client, buyer, customer, user, purchaser, shopper etc.

FumbleFingers
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    Of course, what many people would actually say is As I mentioned, I have two (2) clients in the OMAHA area I’ve been moving freight for for about 16 months. – Barrie England Nov 09 '12 at 21:37
  • @Barrie: I'm sure they would. But of course if I wanted to be picky, I could point out that that's what they would actually say. In speech, the second "for" would be very "unstressed" (as would the first "that" in the sentence before this) - what looks stylistically clunky in the written form can be completely unexceptional in actual speech. – FumbleFingers Nov 09 '12 at 21:49
  • I thought you might say that, and I was aware of the awkwardness of the repeated for, but then writers of emails often replicate the forms of speech. – Barrie England Nov 10 '12 at 06:58
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    @Barrie: Yeah - usually when I read the word for the "voice in my head" hears it as four. But in speech I habitually reduce it, so I'd normally say "...moving freight fə* them"* even if the word only occured once. With the repeated construction here, it's more like "moving freight for f'rabout* 16 months"*. And I wouldn't even enunciate the /r/ if it weren't for "about" starting with a vowel. Don't waste phonemes, I say (you never know if we might run out of them one day, like fossil fuels! :) – FumbleFingers Nov 10 '12 at 15:46
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Collins has personal and organisational alternatives in its first-mentioned definition of client:

client [ˈklaɪənt] n 1. a person, company, etc., that seeks the advice of a professional man or woman

Notice that it uses that rather than who after the closer antecedent company. I'm sure that this licenses 'for which' in the original if 'clients' refers to companies or other organisations. However, I'm equally sure that 'client', no matter whether it refers to an individual or an organisation, connotes enough personality always to license who or whom. I'd opt for the construction indicating person(s) / personification .

Edwin Ashworth
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