Today on the grammar rodeo: that vs. which

New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris explains when the magazine uses “which” and when it uses “that”, a distinction I confess I had little knowledge of until just now.¹ A cheeky example of the difference by E.B. White:

The New Yorker is a magazine, which likes “that.”
The New Yorker is the magazine that likes “which.”

(via df)

1. This is why, when anyone asks me what I do for a living, the answer is never “writer”. Writing for me is a brute-force operation; I’ll use whatever is necessary to make it sound like I’m talking with you in person. (Wait, is a semicolon appropriate there? Should I have used “as though” instead of “like”? Who gives a shit!) I use too many commas (but often not between multiple adjectives in front of nouns), too many “I”s, too many “that”s (OMG, the thats), too many weirdo pacing mechanisms like ellipses, dashes, & parentheses, mix tenses, overuse the passive voice, and place unquoted periods and commas outside quotation marks like the Brits, although I was doing it before I learned they did because it just seemed to make sense. So, anyway, hi, I’m not a writer…who writes a lot.↩

• E.B. White
• language
• Mary Norris
• video