Oops - a wayward double negative - the second sentence should obviously read - 'But I don't understand why you think 'think' wouldn't work in your example'

@Rob Schmidt - obviously a lot of people are quite happy with the 'thing' version, and that's fine. But I don't understand why you don't think 'think' wouldn't work in your example. Surely an expectation is a kind of thought process - the first half could just as well have been expressed as "If you think the CEO will be happy with these results ..." with virtually no change in meaning.

We don't have to be too literal - "believe, expect, imagine, reckon, suppose" are all types of thinking - for me, 'think' still makes more sense than 'thing' after any of these.

For example, here are a couple of lines from Beyoncé's 'If I were a boy", where 'you've got another think coming' would also work very well for the second line.

If you thought I would wait for you
You thought wrong

But I think we could also substitute any of those verbs for 'thought' in the first line, leaving the second line as it is, and it would still work:

If you expected me to wait for you / If you imagined I would wait for you etc
You thought wrong

@Brus - well, we can certainly agree on the strange nature of both contributions, and as it looks as though peace has broken out between us, have a good weekend. :) Incidentally, I hardly ever look at a physical dictionary nowadays. I wrote a little gadget for my blog which allows me to cycle through about a dozen dictionaries in seconds.

Sorry, went a bid mad on typos there.

@Brus - of course we teach our students about formality, but most of us use formal language very rarely. Actually with my students, who were originally taught fairly formally, it's getting them to reduce their levels of formality, not the other way round, that is the problem. In any case we don't teach our students to say 'the man that is standing over there', but we do warn them that native speakers will sometimes use 'that' for people, especially after impersonal pronouns like 'anybody' etc, and that it is perfectly correct.

You won't be surprised to learn that I have no time for the argument that the only correct rules are those of formal English. As the editor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Grammar has said - 'informal is normal'. Why should 'Whom do you know here?' be considered more correct than "Who do you know here?", when hardly anyone would use the first, and if they did they would get funny looks. Yes, I have a duty to teach my students about formal language, but I have just as strong a duty to teach them language that is in normal currency.

I don't know where you get the idea that dictionaries that are published for learners are any different from other dictionaries. Nearly all dictionaries, and especially the OED, are descriptive; that is their job. In fact most learner's dictionaries give much more usage information, including on formality, than standard dictionaries. In any case the likes of Longman and Macmillans no longer market themselves as learner's dictionaries, but have a much wider audience, especially on the web.

In fact, with the Bank of English and their Cobuild project, Collins Dictionary was one of the pioneers of using real life examples rather than those made up their lexicographers. And they are at the forefront again in a new, separate online dictionary, which invites contributions fro the general public, although retaining overall editorial control. And if you'd looked a bit more carefully at Collins, at least the online version, it says - 'that, pronoun - used to introduce a restrictive relative clause ⇒ "the book that we want" '- nothing about being only for things, and further down, among the example sentences is this -"I looked at myself in the mirror and felt reassured by the healthy young man that stared back at me."

Your last two example are interesting:

"The book, which is on the table, ... (explains that that is where it is)
The book which is on the table ... (explains it isn’t some other book you mean)."

While the former is the former is a non-defining (or non-restrictive), which gives us extra information, the latter is a defining or restrictive relative clause which, as you say, tells us which book we're talking about. Now there are many 'purists' (who of course I don't agree with) who insist that we should only use 'that' and not 'which' in defining relative clauses when talking about things, a whim of Fowler's that got taken up by many American publishers, but not only in the US. So your example would be just as wrong in their eyes as alia apparently is in yours.

"Written work is formal in my book" - how much writing is formal these days, really? Academic essays maybe, most business correspondence probably not. And as for comments on this forum, no way! Not even your contributions here follow the conventions of formal language (for example use of contractions). So I think it was a little bit high-handed to pull alia up for using language that was perfectly appropriate in the context. Just saying.

" I had another writer who tried to eliminate all passive usage from my work." Another piece of nonsense. Many of the people who criticise the passive mistake non-passive structures for passives, don't notice passives when they are being used. And the irony is some of the fiercest critics of the passive, like Orwell, use(d) it pretty heavily themselves.

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-misidentifying-passive-and-passive.html

@Brus - ah, it's sparring time again. I'm afraid it's a shibboleth that 'that' can't be used for people in defining (restrictive) relative clauses. What's more, it's the writers of certain American style guides and grammar books that are in the forefront of those criticising this practice, so I think you're a bit wide of the mark there, too. Apart from the MWDEU, all the following sources are British.

'The people (that) I spoke to were very helpful.' - Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
'We haven't met the people that live next door.' - Macmillan Dictionary
'Who was it that said "The Law's an Ass"?' - Longman Dictionary

In the Third Edition of Fowler's, Burchfield says 'Down through the centuries, "that" has been used with a human antecedent'' and the OED quotes it being used by Chaucer and in Wycliffe's bible. MWDEU says that ' "that" has applied to persons since its 18th-century revival just as it did before its 17th-century eclipse.

Well known British grammar writer for foreign learners, Raymond Murphy, in English Grammar in Use, writes - 'You can also use that (instead of who) - "The man that lives next door is very friendly" '.

And another respected British grammar writer, Micheal Swan, - 'Who refers to people and which to things; that can refer to both people and things - "The people that live next door keep having all-night parties." '

And I'm afraid the point about 'whose' is a red herring, as whose can be used for things as well as people, and there is no such possessive as that's, even for things. '(whose is) used to give more information about a person or thing' (OALD) - 'I was at a meeting whose purpose I didn't understand' (Swan) - it's either that or 'of which' -- 'I was at a meeting, the purpose of which I didn't understand'. There ain't no such animal as possessive 'that's'.

So, grammatically at least, alia has nothing to worry about.

@Capitan Typo - in the spirit of the goodwill you have so generously fostered, and in respect for curmudgeons everywhere, including me sometimes, I'll try and refrain from making valid points in the future. Well, until I make my next comment anyway.

@copy editor - there's a whole English-speaking world outside that of professional copy editors, or of those writing academic copy for journals that follow CMOS rules. Outside the US, even. A published world, what's more: according to Google's figures, there are rather more books listed at Google Books with 'do's and don'ts' than 'dos and don'ts', including several in the 'for Dummies' series, and one intriguingly called the 'do's and don'ts of underwear'.

Those who are bound by CMOS, AP or individual house style guides obviously have to go with the flow, but the rest of us have a choice.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22do%27s+and+don%27ts%22&btnG=Search+Books&tbm=bks&tbo=1

@ChrisB - I'm an English teacher (TEFL) and I'd never even heard of an agent noun before today. An agent in passive constructions, yes, but not an agent noun, which I had to look up. Well, you learn something new everyday.

@dave - I admit it's difficult to compare popular spoken language, but what I notice is that most of the complaints about 'was' being used in hypothetical conditionals seem to come from North America. But as you live in North America, I'll take your word as far as common usage goes; that was new to me, although it gels with what they say at Random House. Perhaps that's why there are also more complaints there.

I would quibble with you slightly that 'was' is being used *as* the subjunctive, however; rather it is being used instead of the subjunctive to express the same function - the hypothetical, or as some grammarians call it - the counterfactual, and what in TEFL we call 'unreal past'.

One reason for this quibble is that we can't invert with 'was' as we can with 'were', which I believe to be a feature of the subjunctive. We can say 'Were I to win the lottery tomorrow, I would ...', but we can't do that with 'was'; it just doesn't work.

But back to Brits and 'was'. I tried 'If I were' etc in the British National Corpus (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/), and got the following:

if I was - 901 if I were - 687
if he was - 1407 if he were - 734
if she was - 779 if she was - 488

Now I know that there could be some non-hypothetical instances of 'was' there, but from a quick glance at the 50 examples of each they give, 'was' seems to being used mainly in the hypothetical sense.