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”.’