Use of "who" referring to inanimate objects.

[Mega85]

Have you heard this? I've heard some people use "who" when referring to an inanimate object. It sounds odd to me. I'm at a fast food place and say what I'd like and they don't hear it and they respond "you'd like a who?". This has happened to me at times at restaurants and it sounds odd to me.

[Fieari]

I feel like this would sound right if said in a thick country / southern-belle style accent, and I think I've heard it when going on roadtrips through very rural areas. It definitely sounds strange to me though.

[Flumble]

In dutch I often do this to express disbelief/confusion or rhetorical questions, but never as a serious substitute for "what".

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, at least in the US south and midwest, it's a coy-to-cloying habit that's not really meant seriously, I think gradually going out of fashion. My grandmother will refer to an object among an assortment as "that little guy" and then call it "he" from there, etc.

[CharlieP]

I've never come across it in the UK, but on a tangential note I like to respond to people who misspell "queue" as "que" by replacing it with "what", e.g.

"I was standing in the que".

"You were standing in the what?"

Petty and childish, I know, but it makes me chuckle every time.

[siloguist]

I've never come across it in the UK, but on a tangential note I like to respond to people who misspell "queue" as "que" by replacing it with "what", e.g.

"I was standing in the que".

"You were standing in the what?"

Petty and childish, I know, but it makes me chuckle every time.

Hahaha that's genius!

[TvT Rivals]

(Back to OP:) Better than the opposite, anyway.

[mok-kong shen]

As foreigner I have a question: Would using "whose" referring to inanimate objects be problematic in the same vein?

[Zohar]

Problematic in that it's not using the word as it is intended... "Whose" refers to something that belongs to someone. The answer would often involve "hers" or "his".

"Whose cookie is this?"
"It's mine/it's his/it's Zohar's/I don't know whose cookie it is"

[HES]

Problematic in that it's not using the word as it is intended... "Whose" refers to something that belongs to someone.

Why can't things can 'belong' to inanimate objects? "Whose lid/screw/remote is this"

[gmalivuk]

It's ungrammatical for questions, but works for relative clauses.

"Whose leaves are these?" suggests that a person owns the leaves, but "This is the tree whose leaves look like hands," is generally considered fine (if a bit strange-sounding).

[Zohar]

Problematic in that it's not using the word as it is intended... "Whose" refers to something that belongs to someone.

Why can't things can 'belong' to inanimate objects? "Whose lid/screw/remote is this"

There's a sad joke about corporate personhood here.

[Derek]

There's a sad joke about corporate personhood here.

I don't want to start a political discussion here, but you know that corporate personhood just means that corporations can act as legal entities, right? And they inherit some of the rights of natural persons because they are made up of people. And corporate personhood exists in almost every country.

[Zohar]

I don't know enough about the topic to talk about it very confidently. Those rights may or may not have their place, but they certainly can (and sometimes do) expand into unwarranted and unwanted territory.