Is it wrong to refer to someone as ‘that’?

‘Har-!’ exclaimed my husband, ‘Har-! Har-!’ It is not easy to exclaim the syllable har– without sounding like a walrus, and I can’t say that he succeeded. But he was not wrong. I had read out to him a letter from a reader in Hertfordshire and I had pronounced the t in the county. One can’t exactly say that to do so is incorrect. Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary (1974) gives it with the t silent; but then The Place-Names of Hertfordshire (1938) gives it with the t pronounced. In My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison, singing after a fashion The Rain in Spain, sounds the t. But what did he know?

The gravamen of the complaint from Mr Tony Clayden of Hertfordshire was this: ‘Recently, it has become increasingly common to hear broadcasters, politicians and others use the word that in regard to people, e.g. “the man that was stabbed”, “the woman that won first prize”.’ He asks: ‘Is this now to be regarded as correct, or is it simply a case of an increasing tendency for spoken and written English to descend into ever sloppier usage?’ I wonder whether Mr Clayden has taken into account the direction of travel. The use of that as a relative pronoun for persons was far more common in past centuries. Only remember the Lord’s Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, which says: ‘As we forgive them that trespass against us.’

It is still common to use that as a relative pronoun for classes of people: ‘The butcher that sells the best beef.’ That is also often used after a nonspecific pronoun: ‘Someone that I admired.’

A construction holding up well after centuries is of the kind ‘no one that we need be afraid of’. It is perfectly idiomatic and correct to put a preposition like of at the end of the relative clause.