Asymmetrical Information

Of course, I immediately thought of the Frederic Bastiat essay, That Which Is Seen, And That Which Is Not Seen.

Now, if only people would stop confusing "that" with "who"! When I was growing up I never heard it, but in the past few years my poor ears have been assaulted with the faulty construction, "People that . . . " It travels down to my lower lumbar region and sends burning sensations along neural pathways, making me have to get up and throw myself out a high window.

People WHO! THINGS that!

Who started this "People that" crap?

On the jobsite, its not proper enlgish unless every other word out of your mouth is "f******" or something along those lines.

I'm an enlightened individual. I don't remember that from school. I guess I need to pick a grammer book.

On another note, my high school teacher would probably do the same to me if she found out I was using improper grammer. But then, she would probably expect that from me. I slept through most of her class. :)

So what rule does the Microsoft Office automagic grammarian use when it sticks green underlines under usages of 'which' and 'that?' Is it simply programmed to recommend the opposite form no matter what?

Of course the Microsoft grammararian sucks, we expect no less. However, of what possible use is it to my students who, when confronted with the green underlining, have no clue as to what might be wrong or how to fix it? Evidently the past 20 years or so has seen the disappearance of teaching proper (or even correct) writing.
Besides, if you put one of the papers I receive (even grad students, unfortunately) into Word, the result looks like the Italian flag. Way confusing.

SIGH...I guess I can appreciate the strict adherence to proper grammar, but in all honesty it's little things like this that (which?) make me want to throw my hands up in the air and just give up. Writing coherently is hard enough on a good day, but worrying that I'm making hundreds of little insignificant errors in my grammar just sucks the fun out of it.
This is akin to meeting an old friend and having the following conversation:
ME: Sally! Hi, how are you? What's new?
SALLY: I got engaged last month!
ME: Hey, great! Congratulations.
SALLY: (Stiffening up) It is NOT proper to say "congratulations" to the bride-to-be...you MUST say "best wishes" to me and "congratulations to the groom-to-be".

Now I don't know about you folks, but that little exchange would piss me off even though she's right about the etiquette.

Correcting people is ruder than the original error. . . but it does make the bride sound rather more triumphant than it's polite to mention.

God Bless You, Grammar Woman! I'm a fellow MBA with an undergrad degree in English literature and Classical Studies now teaching freshman composition at a branch of City University here in New York. Would you please come to my class and help bitchslap some sense into my students?

I think we should chuck both words and go with "wot" (put some cockney in the vowel, if possible) wot can serve in place of who, which, and that, as well as the affirmation-seeking query "n'est-ce pas?"

Then I think that Opera needs to fix its browser so I can "click" the "links" on the top portion of Jane's "web-page."

All y'all should hold out for some of Jane's naughty Penn stories... trust me on this one.

Ah the wonders of one's own website, where one can offer one's own views, sprinkled with "should" and "ought", a bit of Safire, a bit of Landers, while leaving out other, well-established and well-regarded views. Clarity is what we are after, isn't it? When "which" confuses and "that" clarifies, who needs a rule, thought up by somebody in love with rules long ago? When asked about leaving the poor preposition stuck just inside the period, W. Churchill (I believe) said that is "one thing up with which I will not put" but in case anybody missed it, he was mocking the rule. He used the language pretty well.

Usage dictated usage until somebody came along and wrote rules. Rules were a big help because then, as now, there were so many versions of English (German, Latin, take your pick) that confusion was very likely between native speakers of any language, as long as they lived some distance apart, geographically or socially. Context, in the case of your two examples, tells us everything we need to know without relying the "proper" use of "which" and "that" to avoid confusion. Rules for the sake of rules? No thank you. My poor students had trouble enough getting past the part about "know what you want to convey before you begin to write."

I have to agree with K. Harris here. The rule as stated is perfectly cogent, but who has ever been confused by the misusage? Consider: "The attendant brought back the car which I gave him earlier in the day to park." versus "The attendant brought back the car that I gave him earlier in the day to park." By the Galt Dictum, the second sentence is confusing because it implies that I gave the attendant several cars, one of which I gave him earlier in the day, while the "which" in the second sentence means I only dropped off one car. Would anyone ever seriously be confused by this?
The reason the two are interchangeable in spoken English is that the context (restrictive or not) is almost always clear in the inflection of the sentence. Good writing ought to be structured so that the difference between restricted and unrestricted clauses doesn't NEED someone to parse out whether "that" or "which" was used, or worse still, used correctly.

Fowler (1926) had a more sophisticated understanding of his classic advice on this subject. (THAT, REL. ". . . & if writers would agree to regard _that_ as the defining relative pronoun, & _which_ as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity & in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of the most or of the best writers.") Three-quarters of a century later, he has largely failed to convince his own countrymen, but language mavens in America seem to want to take his recommendation as gospel.
Get real, Jane.

Authorized Version: This is the day which the Lord hath made . . .

American Std. Version: This the day which Jehovah hath made . . .

Revised Std. Version: This is the day which the Lord has made . . .

Goodspeed-Smith: This is the day that the Lord has made . . .

Ps. 118

Usage rules are not handed down from some platonic ideal; they are what they are. You will probably not be misunderstood if you misuse this particular rule. You will, however, do poorly on the standardized tests which are the gateway to education in this country; you will lose readers who have internalized the rules, and to whom your misusage strikes a grating note. You will also, if you wish to submit your work for publication, or use it to gain work, convince any rigid grammarians among your readers that you are ignorant. It's not as if it's a difficult rule; why so angry?

I'm afraid that my experience in teaching older students, combined with my own foray into the country's educational institutions, has biased me towards the side of the rigid grammarians. If our only problem were students who have not mastered the subtleties of "that" and "which", or even "like" and "as", it would not be worth argument. This is not the case. Whoever is teaching these students is leaving them utterly ignorant of the basics of sentence construction. They write the way they talk, with execrable results -- repetitive, disjointed, without clear direction. And without the visual and audible cues that speech provides, not to mention the possibility for instant correction of any misunderstandings, their writing is also confusing and miserably unclear. Conversation with students has made it clear to me that this ignorance is the result of teachers who, daunted by the task of boring their students with years of dull grammar excercises, told them rules didn't matter and the important thing was to write what they felt. Now they are writing what they feel, and the result is incomprehensible. Bravo.

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