That’s what i always heard too.
Thank you, IG. I see and hear that substitution all the time, and that’s what drives *me *crazy. I had just about given up on there being anyone out there who actually knew English grammar. You’ve given me (a sliver of) hope for the future.
It is entirely acceptable to write either the man that wanted to talk to you, or the man who wanted to talk to you
-The American Heritage College Dictionary. Third edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993, p. 1540.
Sorry, I’ve heard this line before, and I reject it. You can throw a whole library’s worth of dictionaries at me, but I’m not going to accept ‘that’ used as a pronoun for a person. If someone referred to me by the pronoun ‘it’ instead of ‘he,’ I would consider it an insult. Same with ‘that’ for ‘who.’ It just sounds lazy and dumb. Hearing that substitution is like chewing on aluminum foil to me. We’ve got a perfectly fine subject pronoun–who–to be used for persons (as opposed to things); there’s no reason not to use it.
Hmmm. I always thought the ‘that’ in question referred not to the person, but to the action the person was taking. To use the example Cisco gave, ‘that’ refers not to the man, but to the ‘wanting to talk’ part.
No, in **Cisco’s **example, “the man that wanted to talk to you,” *that *is the subject of the subordinate clause 'that wanted to talk to you"; that is the subject pronoun, its antecedent being ‘man.’
People seem to think this stuff doesn’t matter, but I’m convinced it does. For instance:
As noted upthread, “Pink Houses” is a rather sarcastic, cynical song about living in the USA. It seems to be misunderstood, probably because it’s uptempo and has lines about “home of the free” and such. (It’s not unlike Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” in that sense.) But it really does help to know the lyrics to a song, so you can actually tell what the singer is saying. Mellencamp is commenting on the banality of the life that most modern, non-upper class Americans live. Living in a little pink house, listening to some rock ‘n’ roll, spending a week’s vacation in some motel in Florida–this is as good as it gets for most of us. Think about the line in the second verse, about the cousin telling him (presumably Mellencamp) “boy, you’re gonna be the President”; he dismisses the idea of some nobody like him being President–of achieving a higher station in life–as a “crazy dream.” (Though the election of Obama does give one pause there.) It’s all about banal, dead end, all-too-common lives, like we see around us everywhere in this supposed land of opportunity–the kind of society where the individual is increasingly devalued, treated like an object instead of a human being.
That devaluation is something that can be reflected in the language. Like, say, calling a person a ‘that’ instead of a ‘who.’ Which is, as I noted above, one step away from considering a person not as a ‘he’ or a ‘she,’ but an ‘it.’
See, it all ties together.
Now let’s all go listen to our copies of The Lonesome Jubilee.