By the way, Alif had a good post about this too.

Speaking of Wolfson, Ben I would have responded to your hang-out-at-Barbes post, but I already had plans that evening.

I think it’s much more common in spoken than written English. I challenge you to find an example, though, in a published text (except, that is, within reported speech).

then i realized that i can’t be just me. if it were just me, chris wouldn’t be getting so many papers using that like that.

so i went up to my wife and said: “plato is the guy that wrote the republic” and asked her if that sentence sounded weird. she said, “no.” “nothing’s strange about it at all?” i asked again. “well, i guess i would use the word ‘who’, but otherwise it sounds okay.”

for whatever that’s worth.

I see where you’re coming from – if the person referred to is a generality, you can get away with either usage: “Socrates was the sort of person that would stop you in the street to hold an embarrassing conversation” will do, because you’re citing Socrates as an example of a category which also includes the Ancient Mariner and several street people. In this context “that” at least partly references the category (although “who” sounds right as well).

But “Socrates was a philosopher that asked his friends to sacrifice a cock to Asklepios” still sounds weird because the sense of the phrase governing “that” is unequivocally the unique individual, Socrates, who should be, as here, referred to by “who”, denoting a chap, not a concept or a collective.

I agree there are grey areas, but I’d have thought that Chris’s example in the post was still clearly wrong, colloquially or not. One can probably avoid the issue by using the Damon Runyon construction: “Socrates is such a guy as will…”