did used to

I remember a while back M56 condemned sentences such as these:

"Did you used to play tennis?"
"No, we didn't used to do that."
"We did used to go to park every day." (where "did" is emphatic)

The argument was that "used" should be "use" when paired with "did", on the grounds that "did" is already in the past tense. Normally, when using another verb with "did", you would use the bare infinitive: "We did go to the beach", and definitely not "We did went to the beach." His argument is that "used" is the past tense form of "use", and it would follow this rule just like any other verb.

The problem is that this sense of "use" is generally used only in discussion of the past. Its meaning is also inherently connected to the past tense. You can't say "I use to do it" to mean "I often do it", only "I used to do it" to mean "I often did it".

Moreover, despite its origins, it's pretty much a separate verb from "use" now; it isn't even pronounced the same. "Used" as in "to use" has a voiced "s" and an audible "d", whereas "used" as in "used to do something" has a devoiced "s" and very often the "d" is elided. (This elision doesn't help matters, since "did you use to" and "did you used to" would then be pronounced the same.)

The argument was apparently that allowing "did used to" would be a strange inconsistency. After all, no other verbs work this way. You can't say "did would", for example. But "did use to" isn't entirely consistent either: this is, again, almost the only context that this verb ever takes another form, and it's also the only auxiliary verb I can think of that can occur in the infinitive. "Used" as in "used to" is an inherently special verb, it seems. Both arguments seem perfectly reasonable to me.

"Did used to" is also considered non-standard English. In a formal document, I would avoid it -- but not by using "did use to" instead. Rather, I would prefer to reword it altogether and avoid the problem. Anyway, despite its non-standard status, "did used to" appears to be much more common, and it's the form that looks more natural to me. I think it's OK to use it in colloquial writing, but that's only my opinion.

What opinions do you guys have on this construction?

- Kef

regard the book <<English Grammar in use>> the correct way to ask with this term in a past tense should be "did use to"

"Used to" seems to be a defective quasimodal verb; unlike other quasimodal forms, such as "have to" and "need to", it lacks a present form, and only has a preterite/past participle form ("used to") and an infinitive form ("use to"). Note that in many dialects the two forms are likely to be homophones, but in some, such as mine, the two are kept distinct.

When people write things like "did used to" (["dI:d"jus:tu:] or carefully ["dI:d"just:u:] here) I myself suspect that such is due to "used to" and "use to" being homophones in the writer's dialect; for such individuals, the difference between "used to" and "use to" is merely a matter of formal orthography. However, such usages are ungrammatical here as the two forms are still distinct here; such must be "did use to" ["dI:d"justu:] here.

<I remember a while back M56 condemned sentences such as these: >

For me "did you use to?" and "I didn't use to". "I used to" in the affirmative. Why do you prefer another way?

I don't really have a *reason* for preferring another way, it's just that I always thought that's how it was written until it was pointed out in that thread. Somehow it never even occurred to me that "did you used to" is grammatically inconsistent.

- Kef

<Somehow it never even occurred to me that "did you used to" is grammatically inconsistent. >

Does that matter to you?

furrykef

Funny you should say that. I always thought it was 'I didn't used to' as well, until I noiced it written with the present tense of the verb, and realised that the form I used didn't really seem grammatical. I believe you are American, aren't you? I'm British, so it's obviously the same thying here.

Yes, I'm American.

<<<< Somehow it never even occurred to me that "did you used to" is grammatically inconsistent. >>>>

<< Does that matter to you? >>

In this case, it doesn't terribly concern me. There's a certain point where common usage trumps logic or prescription, although that may not hold in formal registers of English (especially pedantic registers that, for example, require "It is I" instead of "It's me").

Although, apparently, "did used to" isn't as universal as I thought, since Travis pointed out that some dialects distinguish them in speech, not just writing.

- Kef

I pronounce the past and infinitive forms identically, as [ju:stu] or [ju:st@]:

I used to do it. [aI "ju:st@ "du: It]
I did use to do it. [aI "dId %ju:st@ "du: It]

But I like to maintain the distinction in spelling - "did used to" just looks unnatural to me.

I think we should just write "used to" as "use to" as that makes the spelling distinct from "used to", which is pronounced [juzd tu], as in "wood is used to make furniture". So we should write "I use to go there", rather than "I used to go there" as there's no present tense form of "use to".

<There's a certain point where common usage trumps logic or prescription,>


Does common usage favour "did used to"?

Google results favor "did use to":

"i did use to" 20,600
"i did used to" 15,200

"we did use to" 16,000
"we did used to" 608

"you did use to" 16,100
"you did used to" 9,370

"he did use to" 20,600
"he did used to" 15,200

"she did use to" 8,100
"she did used to" 8,070

"they did use to" 22,300
"they did used to" 14,700

But that's not the most common construction. That would be "Did you use(d) to...?" But you can't really google for that, because googling for "did you use to" also brings up irrelevant hits such as, "What software did you use to create this?"

Also, you can only rely so much on google hits. I've had occasions where something with over 10,000 google hits yielded no more than 3 pages of results. Quoting from Wikipedia's guidelines:

<< For search terms that return many results, Google uses a process that eliminates results which are "very similar" to other results listed, both by disregarding pages with substantially similar content and by limiting the number of pages that can be returned from any given domain. For example, a search on "Taco Bell" will only give a couple pages from tacobell.com even though many in that domain will certainly match. Further, Google's list of unique results is constructed by first selecting the top 1000 results and then eliminating duplicates without replacements. Hence the list of unique results will always contain fewer than 1000 results regardless of how many webpages actually matched the search terms. For example, from the about 742 million pages related to "Microsoft", Google presently returns 552 "unique" results (as of Jan 9, 2006[4]). Caution must be used in judging the relative importance of websites yielding well over 1000 search results. >>

So when the two numbers are relatively close to each other, it might not mean squat. Even when one number is much, much higher than another, it isn't *necessarily* true that it has more hits than the other phrase, though it's probably likely.

I'm sure Pos is going to jump down my throat -- metaphorically speaking, of course -- because I've used Google hits to try to prove points before... I don't think I used comparisons where the difference between the two numbers was so small in each case, though.

- Kef

>>I think we should just write "used to" as "use to" as that makes the spelling distinct from "used to", which is pronounced [juzd tu], as in "wood is used to make furniture". So we should write "I use to go there", rather than "I used to go there" as there's no present tense form of "use to".<<

Remember, though, that there are some dialects, such as my own, which still make a distinction between the infinitive "use to" and the preterite/past participle "used to"...

The thing, though, is that my dialect seems to preserve consonant length much better than many other ones even in informal speech (as there are certain words which always have long consonants in informal speech here), for which consonant length is treated as inconsequential except at boundaries between stressed words (including as parts of compounds). For instance, most dialects tend to simply lose the long consonant in formal ["just:u], while mine makes it easier to pronounce by shifting the quantity of [t] to [s] instead. Consequently, most dialects have lost the distinction between "use to" and "used to" while mine has preserved it.