for the last fucking time

[rone]

"Didn't this used to be..." is WRONG. "Did" is past tense, so "used" need not be. "Didn't this use to be..." is the right way to write that. Hell, i even found this written wrong in American Gods.

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

I agree that "used to be" is a phrase and ought not to be conjugated - mentally, one is putting parenthesis around the "used to be" phrase. But also, "didn't this use(d) to be" is hardly proper English either way - it's demotic, you can't make it correct. The correct English is probably just "Wasn't this - ?"

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yes, but if i argue for the stamping out of ungrammatical idioms, i'll never hear the end of it.

[alfvaen]

And what you are doing now is...? Arguing for the stamping out of ungrammatical idioms?

I can't even figure out in my mind a grammatical sentence where the phrase "used to" could derive from. Unless it does come from "I was used to it being there"->"It used to be there".

Maybe we should change it to "useta" so its atomic inconjugable nature is more clear. I've never seen it "use to" myself in what I consider correct writing; however much the "d" is elided against the "t", it's still there in my mind.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

No, the stamping out of ungrammatical ungrammatical idioms.

I did consider "useta" as a viable alternative. However, my position on this is such: In English, the verb "to use" is used in an auxiliary manner, in the exact way the verb "soler" is used in Spanish. As such, it should be used in a consistent manner, even if it isn't technically conjugated.

So quit trying to justify lexical abominations, you little rat finks. I will only bend so far.