more on "which" and "that"

[Laurence Horn]

>I am rather surprised that educated and otherwise apparently respectable
>persons who actually hold jobs involving writing are promulgating this
>'rule'. I never heard this 'rule' during my school days; I was taught
>explicitly that non-restrictive "which" usually has a comma and that
>restrictive "which" usually does not (which is natural based on speech
>rhythm anyway IMHO); I suppose I'd read enough even by junior high school
>to know that any 'rule' against restrictive "which" is bogus, but the issue
>never arose. I was mystified for some time in the late 1990's by the
>Microsoft grammar-checker flagging my restrictive "which" here and there;
>when I figured out what was happening I wrote it off to post-literacy among
>the, uh, experts writing the database. But now I suppose enough time has
>passed that even the, uh, editors are post-literate in many cases.
>
>I'm with Arnold and the M-W folks, of course.
>
>-- Doug Wilson

The fear of restrictive whiches was already well ensconced among the
U. of Chicago copy-editors in 1988, FWIW.  I don't know if that means
it's also in the contemporaneous _Chicago Manual of Style_.

Larry