“The Wary I” has made yet one more contribution to the great plastic-bag debate (March 22). But that’s not all. The columnist has found time to offer “let’s call him Alan” free advice on how to write. Alan’s memo, it seems, could have been improved by capitalizing the first “T” in “The Enterprise” and by writing “barbed wire” instead of “barb wire.”

Such generosity should not go unrewarded. Let the columnist, then, re-examine this part of his own text: “It didn’t used to be …”

Now, anyone who has heard adults trying to learn English knows that “did” and “didn’t,” used as auxiliaries, present stumbling blocks. Beginners may say things like “Did you brought a cloth bag to the Co-op?” and “I didn’t knew that.” They keep forgetting that “did” and “didn’t” provide past-tense markers, and using past-tense forms for the verbs that follow is incorrect.

But it would be very unusual for someone whose first language is English to make that kind of mistake. And in many contexts that’s true even for the verb “to use.” Those proficient in English are very unlikely to say or write “Did you used a different browser?” or “Didn’t he used a torque wrench?”

It’s a different matter, however, when “use” is followed by an infinitive. That’s when we start acting as if we didn’t quite get the idea about the role of “did” or “didn’t,” and we write, redundantly, “did you used to” and “they didn’t used to.” And the oddity belongs entirely to the written language.

When spoken, “use to” and “used to” are really indistinguishable; and we speak our first language long before we write it. That’s why the oddity occurs only in this kind of context. We don’t write “used” when it would actually sound wrong.

The easiest response to all this is obviously to ignore it. Alternatively, one may simply describe it, noting that this is the way many people write, educated people whose first language is English. Or one may prescribe what’s more logical and more economical (saves one character, sweet for a tweet!). Right, good luck with that.

Julian Irias

Davis

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