Grammar Girl here.

Today's topic is who vs. that.

Leslie called in with this question.

My pet peeve is who vs. that as in, you know Bob, he's the guy that sold me my car.

It drives me nuts.

Or am I mistaken and it's just become part of the new English, verbiage in the evolution

of the language.

I kind of talked about this question in episode 7, but other people have also asked the same

thing recently, including Corinne, so I thought it would be worth going into a little further.

The quick and dirty answer is that you use who when you're talking about a person and

that when you're talking about an object.

Stick with that rule and you'll be safe.

But of course, it's more complicated than that.

The who goes with people rule is the conventional wisdom.

But on the other hand, I did find a credible reference that says otherwise.

I was shocked to see that my American heritage dictionary says, quote, it's entirely acceptable

to write either the man that wanted to talk to you or the man who wanted to talk to you.

Wow.

So I dug around some more and found that there is a long history of writers using that as

a relative pronoun when writing about people.

Chaucer did it, for example.

So it's more of a great area than some people think, and if you have strong feelings about

...