The word originally was used by the Greeks for what they perceived as grammatical mistakes in their language.
[2][3] Ancient Athenians considered the dialect of the inhabitants of Soli, Cilicia to be a corrupted form of their pure Attic dialect and labelled the errors in the form as "solecisms" (Greek: σολοικισμοί, soloikismoí; sing.
Therefore, when referring to similar grammatical mistakes heard in the speech of Athenians, they described them as "solecisms" and that term has been adopted as a label for grammatical mistakes in any language; in Greek there is often a distinction in the relevant terms in that a mistake in semantics (i.e., a use of words with other-than-appropriate meaning or a neologism constructed through application of generative rules by an outsider) is called a barbarism (βαρβαρισμός barbarismos), whereas solecism refers to mistakes in syntax, in the construction of sentences.
(Hypercorrection resulting from the perception that "whom" is a formal version of "who" or that the pronoun is functioning as an object when, in fact, it is subject [One would say, "Shall I say who is calling?].
The leading pronoun could be an object only if, "say" were used transitively and the sentence were structured thus: "Whom shall I say to be calling?")