Re: USAGE: What to do about punctuation?

On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 12:26:38AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> It is not and never has been a rule of English that "which" be avoided
> in restrictive relative clauses, despite some editors and some grammar
> checkers which (or that) believe it.  There are many, many counterexamples
> in carefully written and edited prose.
In fact, I *always* use "which" when an inanimate relative pronoun is
called for; I only use "that" as a relative conjunction.  So I would
never say "the movie that I saw", but rather "the movie which I saw",
and this causes interminable headaches with Microsoft Word's "grammar
checker", which seems to believe in the rule you disavow above.

> Here's a nice example of contrast:
>
> Rhetorical:  "He was an old, and to their generation lost, liberator."
> Structural:  "He was an old and, to their generation, lost liberator."
But the structural punctuation is often treated by readers as though it were
still rhetorical, which would result in extra pauses between "and" and "to"
and "generation" and "lost" above.

-Mark