Random thoughts on had rather, profusely illustrated with extracts from literature

Somebody wrote to WordReference forums with a 'question taken from an exam', where you have to fill the gap with one of the options given:

"She ____they travelled by bus."

1. would sooner
2. had rather
3. had sooner

I don't know whether it said 'Choose the best option' or 'Choose the correct option', but either way, the answer they gave was 1. - would sooner. But what I'm interested in is whether both the other answers are 'wrong'.

Whom watch #4 - On Messrs Gwynne, Lowth, Priestley and Shakespeare, with a few asides on the way

This is the fourth post in a series on the inappropriate teaching of the use of whom. In this post I look at:

• a silly grammar quiz question
• some early examples of who being used where the purists would demand whom
• conflicting views from the writers of two early grammar books
• how the whom camp triumphed for two centuries
• examples of object who in Shakespeare

and also take a few somewhat meandering detours on the way. Clicking on the framed extracts will usually take you to Google Books.

Random thoughts on Mr Gwynne, sex and gender

Neville Gwynne is the author of a best-selling grammar book 'Gwynne’s Grammar', modestly entitled 'The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English'. I confess to not having read Mr Gwynne's book, but I think we can get a fairly good idea as to the affable Mr Gwynne's attitude to English in various other ways: from an interview he gave on BBC Radio 5, from a grammar quiz he wrote for the Telegraph newspaper, from the Preface, first two chapters and recommended reading from the book itself, available to read at Amazon; and from various reviews, especially rather a long one in the Telegraph.

While I was reading the preface to his book at Amazon, I came across an apparent distinction between the words gender and sex I had only vaguely heard about before.