Doctor Bob
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Bottom Line: TODAY'S grammarians don't care anymore though they once made a big deal out of it.
Interesting history below: (taken from http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/which.htm)
WHICH VERSUS THAT
When to use each in subordinate clauses.
To judge from correspondence, people are confused about which and that and, especially, which one to use when introducing clauses that modify nouns. This isn’t surprising, as there has been a shift in usage over the past century or so and older guides give different advice from newer ones.
The usage is intimately tied up with the distinction that grammarians make between two types of clause, which they call restrictive and non-restrictive. A restrictive clause is one that limits, or restricts, the scope of the noun it is referring to. Take these examples:
The house that is painted pink has just been sold.
The house, which is painted pink, has just been sold.
In the first one, the clause “that is painted pink” is a restrictive clause, because it limits the scope of the word “house”, indicating that the writer doesn’t mean any house, only the one that has been painted in that particular colour; if he takes that clause out, all that’s left is The house has just been sold: the reader no longer knows which house is being referred to and the sentence loses some crucial information. In the second example the clause is non-restrictive: the writer is giving additional information about a house he’s describing; the clause which is painted pink is here parenthetical — the writer is saying “by the way, the house is painted pink” as an additional bit of information that’s not essential to the meaning and could be taken out.
Here’s another example:
Another cause of stress is a traumatic event that is out of the ordinary and has a major impact on the person’s life.
The argument here is that the clause “that is out of the ordinary and has a major impact on the person’s life” modifies and constrains “event”. It’s not just any event but one specific type of event, to the extent that the whole block from “event” onwards forms one idea. The clause is restrictive.
Older grammar books make two firm points about the difference between the two types of clause:
Restrictive clauses are introduced by that and are not separated from the rest of the sentence by commas.
Non-restrictive clauses are introduced by which and must be separated by commas from the rest of the sentence to indicate parenthesis.
This makes the whole matter seem neat and simple. But few writers have ever followed these rules systematically, and it’s easy to find examples in which which is used to start a restrictive clause. Sir Ernest Gowers, writing in the 1965 edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, comments rather sadly about this situation:
If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity and in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers.
This is even more true today than when he wrote it; most modern grammar guides have caught up with the way people actually use the language and now say that either relative pronoun can be used with restrictive clauses.
 Posted 271 day ago
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