Discussion Groups / English Usage / December 2006

I hear this often but it sounds wrong. I always assumed "I'd rather do
X" to mean "I would do X instead". So it doesn't seem correct to say
"I'd rather you eat the pie". If it's wrong, what is a correct way? "I
would prefer if you ate the pie"? Thank you

Read the following excerpt:
"The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting
wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down,
walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a

I've recently been reminded of yet another idiom that seems
so absurd that I wonder why people use it.  In a discussion
of fishing in a Dorothy Sayers book, someone remarks that
people are catching trout that are so small they should be

Euphemism strikes again. Attempting to search for headphones on Ebay, my
task was made difficult by the near-universal use of "headphones" to mean
"earphones". Isn't this the kind of nonsense the EU was set up to
prevent?...

College students can borrow______them.
  A whatever that interests      B whatever interests
  The right answer is B, but I want to know why not choose A.

Yes, folks, kids really love my balls.  They just run up and start to
touch and squeeze my balls when they're on the ground.  Understand, I
don't leave my balls on the ground for long; they're very tender and I
don't want them getting dirtied by peoples careless shoe prints.

There was a report on John McKissik on TV recently in which he was
refered to, not just once, as the "winningest football coach" of all
times. Although it's pretty clear to me what it is supposed to mean I
wonder about the grammar that is used here.

When I look inside a washing machine I see the connector has three
terminals, marked "L", "N" and "PE". When I look on the backside of my old
Cossor tube radiogram, there are two terminals marked "ANT" and "EARTH". I
know that antique radios in the UK have "AE" + "EARTH", which is a