# had used to



## Thomas1

I came across the usage of used to in past perfect a couple of months ago and it's been nyrking me ever since. My questions are: is it often used in past perfect? Would you use it in past perfect? If you read it in a sentence like:
[...] I may not prescribe to have land it self, for I may not say that I and my ancestors *had used to have* such land [...]
*The English Reports - Page 6*

what do you make of using past perfect with _used to have_?

To give you a few more samples of what I have in mind plesae have a look here: had used to be, had used to think, had used to have. 

Input appreciated.

Thanks, 
Tom


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## ewie

Hello Tom. In *all* the examples I've looked at in your links the word _had_ in _had used to _feels totally redundant.  The '_had_ness' is already contained in the _used to_ part, if that makes sense.

('Nyrking'? Do you mean _narking_ or _irking_? Great word, though!)


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## Thomas Tompion

ewie said:


> Hello Tom. In *all* the examples I've looked at in your links the word _had_ in _had used to _feels totally redundant. The '_had_ness' is already contained in the _used to_ part, if that makes sense.
> 
> ('Nyrking'? Do you mean _narking_ or _irking_? Great word, though!)


 
Hi Tom,

I've not come across you on the forum lately.

For once I'm with Ewie: I'd cut the *had*.  It feels quite wrong.


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## Matching Mole

It seems to me that originally, where now we only use "used to" (or "didn't use[d] to"), "use to", meaning to be accustomed or wont to do or be something, was used in various tenses like other verbs. Therefore it would not have seemed odd to say "had used to" or "were used to". However, I think this would be generally now be considered obsolete, along with "uses to", "using to", etc., now that it is only used in one tense.


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## Thomas Tompion

I was interested in what the matching one was saying and wondering if the verb was really once 'I use to do something' - a present tense being, I suppose, a complicated way of saying 'I do something', then I came across this, with its suggestion that people all over the English-speaking world are writing I didn't use to do something where I would write I didn't used to do something. Is this an AE/BE split? is the one regarded as wrong somewhere and wrong elsewhere and vice versa? and/or am I out on a limb?


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## Matching Mole

Did you see the recent thread on "Usedn't" Thomas?

There is much discussion on "use(d) to" in various forms. I give examples of "uses to", etc., there (page 4, post #71), and some notes on the correctness of "didn't used" from Merriam-Webster. There does indeed appear to be a split to a certain extent.


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## Thomas1

Thank you all for your replies. 

Just to make sure: would you suggest not using it at all in modern English?

Ewie: I don't know where I got the word from... but I'm almost sure I must've come across it somewhere, or at least something similar to it.

Thomas, good to "see" you on the forum too. 



Tom


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## ewie

Thomas1 said:


> Just to make sure: would you suggest not using it at all in modern English?


No, definitely not.
(As MM hinted above, I wouldn't be particularly surprised to find it in, say, 19th-century writing ~ back then they did all kinds of things with the verb _have_ which now seem odd to us.  I happen to be reading a 19th-century novel at the moment and I keep coming across things that I *read* in the 20th century before noticing that it says something else, e.g. _You had better do such-and-such, had not you?_ etc.)


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## Xander2024

Do you mean to say we don't need to apply the tense backshift in the reported speech in that case?

"He said he had (?) used to live next door to her when he was a little boy"  

Thank you.


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## EStjarn

To illustrate how I understand this, here's a comparison between the verbs 'live' and 'used to':

1a) Direct speech: _I lived next door to her when I was a little boy. _
1b) Reported speech I: _He said he had lived next door to her when he was a little boy. _
1c) Reported speech without have: _He said he lived next door to her when he was a little boy. _
1d) Which in direct speech translates to: _I live next door to her when I was a little boy. _

In the case of 'live', 'had' cannot (or should not) be dropped in reported speech because it will (or may) alter the understanding of what was originally said.

2a) Direct speech: _I used to live next door to her when I was a little boy. _
2b) Reported speech with 'had':_ He said he had used to live next door to her when he was a little boy. _
2c) Reported speech without 'had':_ He said he used to live next door to her when he was a little boy. _
2d) Which in direct speech translates to: _I used to live next door to her when I was a little boy. _

In the case of 'used to', because there is no such form as 'use to' here, i.e. _I use to live next door to her when I was a little boy_, 'had' may be dropped. The understanding of what was originally said won't change.


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## Thomas Tompion

Hi EStjarn.

I don't think I could say _He said he had used to live next door to her when he was a little boy_; it would have to be He said he used to live next door to her when he was a little boy.

On the other hand, I very definitely could say _He said he lived next door to her when he was a little boy. _and probably, in many cases, would prefer it to _He said he had lived next door to her when he was a little boy.

_Certainly the direct speech_ I live next door to her _becomes when reported either _He says he lives next door to her _or_ He said he lived next door to her _or, at a pinch, to highlight the fact that he still lives there, _He said he lives next door to her_, but I don't think direct speech _I lived next door to her _has to translate_ He said he had lived next door to her_; we often say_ He said he used to live next door to her_. It can, even in reported speech, be important to reserve the past perfect for cases where he had ceased living next door to her.


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## Xander2024

Thanks a lot, EStjarn and Thomas.


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## EStjarn

Hello Thomas, and thank you for commenting.



> I don't think I could say _He said he had used to live next door to her when he was a little boy_; it would have to be He said he used to live next door to her when he was a little boy.



From your previous post in this thread, I suspected you would not be likely to use 'had used to'. But I also notice on GoogleWeb as well as on GoogleBooks that the construction is out there. That's why I didn't want to mark it with a cross. Would you go as far as saying the construction is incorrect? Or is it a question of preference? (Note that I'm not arguing for the use of 'had used to'. I'm simply trying to establish whether it is wrong. I too prefer the more economic version.)



> On the other hand, I very definitely could say _He said he lived next door to her when he was a little boy. _and probably, in many cases, would prefer it to _He said he had lived next door to her when he was a little boy._



Yes, in the example sentence it is true that omitting 'had' will not very likely make a listener come to a faulty conclusion regarding what has been said. And I understand this to be so because of the presence of the dependent clause "when he was a little boy." Without that clause, omitting 'had' would not make for a correct understanding:_ He said he lived next door to her, _should, unless context might suggest otherwise, in direct speech translate, _I live next door to her_.

But your point is interesting because I wasn't aware of that as long as no misunderstanding is likely to result, we may - and perhaps it's even preferable that we do - refrain from backshifting when reporting speech.




> It can, even in reported speech, be important to reserve the past perfect for cases where he had ceased living next door to her.



This part I don't quite understand because I can't think of a way of using the past perfect ('had lived') when 'he' is still living next door to 'her'. In other words, the past perfect in reported speech is already reserved for the case where he has ceased being her neighbor.


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## Thomas Tompion

EStjarn said:


> [...]1. _He said he had used to live next door to her when he was a little boy_
> From your previous post in this thread, I suspected you would not be likely to use 'had used to'. But I also notice on GoogleWeb as well as on GoogleBooks that the construction is out there. That's why I didn't want to mark it with a cross. Would you go as far as saying the construction is incorrect? No, I wouldn't, but I'm not very familiar with it and it's quite a tangle, so I wouldn't use it. Or is it a question of preference? (Note that I'm not arguing for the use of 'had used to'. I'm simply trying to establish whether it is wrong. I too prefer the more economic version.)
> 
> _2. He said he had lived next door to her when he was a little boy._
> 
> Yes, in the example sentence it is true that omitting 'had' will not very likely make a listener come to a faulty conclusion regarding what has been said. This is to suggest that the reported speech version will always tell us what the direct speech version was. I don't think this is the case. And I understand this to be so because of the presence of the dependent clause "when he was a little boy." Without that clause, omitting 'had' would not make for a correct understanding:_ He said he lived next door to her, _should, unless context might suggest otherwise, in direct speech translate, _I live next door to her_. This is the point; I think it could equally fairly translate, _I lived next door to her_. I don't think there is an automatic backshift of the simple past to the past perfect in this sort of case.
> 
> But your point is interesting because I wasn't aware of that as long as no misunderstanding is likely to result, we may - and perhaps it's even preferable that we do - refrain from backshifting when reporting speech.
> 
> 
> Thomas Tompion said:
> 
> 
> 
> It can, even in reported speech, be important to reserve the past perfect for cases where he had ceased living next door to her.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This part I don't quite understand because I can't think of a way of using the past perfect ('had lived') when 'he' is still living next door to 'her'. In other words, the past perfect in reported speech is already reserved for the case where he has ceased being her neighbor.
Click to expand...

My point was that if you translate _I lived next door to her_ as _He said he had lived next door to her_, how do you translate_ I had lived next door to her_?


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## Xander2024

"I had lived next door to her" remains the same even in the reported speech:

"I had lived next door to her before I came to live here" - though we can just as well do without the Past Perfect here, right?

"He said he had lived next door to her before he came to live here".


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## PaulQ

You have it correct, Xander.


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## Xander2024

Thanks, Paul. So what do you think of using "had" with "used to"? (as in post 9)


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## Loob

Xander2024 said:


> Thanks, Paul. So what do you think of using "had" with "used to"? (as in post 9)


Hi Xander

I'm not Paul cool, but I wouldn't use "had used to", for the reasons given by MM in post 6 and ewie in post 8.


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## Xander2024

Thanks, Loob.


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## PaulQ

I'm not Loob )), but I agree with her. 

If you want to use the pluperfect, the only way to do it (that I can think of offhand) is, 

He used to live next door to her three years ago = He had been living next door to her three years ago


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## Xander2024

Thanks for the response, Paul.


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## Ahmed Al Saady

Hi everybody!
May anyone kindly let me know the following sentence is grammatically correct, or is not?
On my balcony I sat last night watching the stars, to which — when I was little — I had used to whisper my pure dreams, every night, before going to sleep.
Thank you!


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## Loob

Ahmed Al Saady said:


> Hi everybody!
> May anyone kindly let me know the following sentence is grammatically correct, or is not?
> On my balcony I sat last night watching the stars, to which — when I was little — I had used to whisper my pure dreams, every night, before going to sleep.
> Thank you!


I'm sorry, Ahmed Al Saady, your sentence really doesn't work. As indicated earlier in the thread, we don't say "had used to" in today's English.

Your sentence would work if you used "used to" instead: 
_On my balcony I sat last night watching the stars, to which — when I was little —* I used to *whisper my pure dreams, every night, before going to sleep._


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## Ahmed Al Saady

Loob said:


> I'm sorry, Ahmed Al Saady, your sentence really doesn't work. As indicated earlier in the thread, we don't say "had used to" in today's English.
> 
> Your sentence would work if you used "used to" instead:
> _On my balcony I sat last night watching the stars, to which — when I was little —* I used to *whisper my pure dreams, every night, before going to sleep._


Thank you very much for the clarification!


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## Gillebride

I'm finding this thread very interesting. I'm a 38 year old native British English speaker of a relatively conservative (RP) dialect. I would definitely regard "had used to" as correct English. Not only that, I would see it as having a meaning distinct from "used to". In the way I would speak (or write) English "On my balcony I sat watching the stars, to which - when I was little - I had used to whisper my pure dreams" is exactly correct because we need a pluperfect. The reference is to a habitual situation in a time period prior to the time at which the main narrative is taking place. Had I said "used to whisper my pure dreams" that would implicitly place me, as the narrator, in present rather than past time. However, it seems that most of the people on this thread are convinced that "had used to" is not permissible. My feeling is that in contemporary American English (perhaps some British English as well) the distinction between perfect aspect and simple past tense is no longer not quite so firmly upheld as perhaps it once was. Incidentally, Robert Binnick of the the University of Toronto in "The Markers of Habitual Aspect in English" argues that "used to" is technically a present, not a past tense, and that "had used to" is its part tense form - although he seems somewhat doubtful as to whether you can say "had used to" in American English. 

In fact, to my ear, it's not even wrong to form a future perfect of "used to". As in "I will have used to smoke, I expect, but I'll have stopped by then". Weird? Yes. Unlikely? For sure. Wrong? Well, grammar is about explaining how people do speak, not how they're supposed to!


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## Gillebride

Ahmed Al Saady said:


> Hi everybody!
> May anyone kindly let me know the following sentence is grammatically correct, or is not?
> On my balcony I sat last night watching the stars, to which — when I was little — I had used to whisper my pure dreams, every night, before going to sleep.
> Thank you!



Hi - I've just posted on this below. I don't believe in there being one correct way to write or speak English. But as an Oxford educated speaker of standard British English, my take is that "had used to" is the correct form to use here.


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## AnythingGoes

I would never say I *had* used to do anything. I'm pretty sure I've seen the usage in texts from the nineteenth century and earlier, but it's not part of contemporary American English.


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## Gillebride

AnythingGoes said:


> I would never say I *had* used to do anything. I'm pretty sure I've seen the usage in texts from the nineteenth century and earlier, but it's not part of contemporary American English.


Googling this, I notice that in Visser's "An Historical Syntax of the English Language", he says that "used to" is now preferred to "had used to". He cites some examples of people saying "had used to" where I would definitely say "used to". So it looks as if there is a pretty long history to this. But "had used to" - to me, anyway - expresses a slightly different tense.


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## Thomas Tompion

I've altered my view since 2008 and think that Gillebride has a good point.

Certainly there's a difference between a habit in the past -_ I used to go skating_ - and an anterior habit in the past, something which we remember in the past as being a habit of a previous time -_ I remember in my twenties thinking back to how we had used to go skating when we were children_.

I note that several members think that this anterior-habit usage is defunct in modern English, that the _had_ has become obsolete, but the British Corpus does have several examples of it, which strike me as entirely idiomatic, examples where the _had_ contributes its traditional function of taking us one stage back in time.

Here are two:

_Already it was after five. In a very little, it would be the time when once she had used to sit with Mama_ The Diamond Waterfall. Haines, Pamela.

_Huddled behind a clump of trees, several villagers pointed to an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a truck in the valley far below which they said Serbian forces had used to pummel their homes._ [Daily Telegraph, elect. edn. of 1992]

In both examples a past time-frame has been established, from which anterior (further back) reference is made to a habit.  A simple 'used to' would lose the element of anteriority and hence have a different meaning.

I was sceptical about the view that the form didn't exist in modern American English and, certainly, the American Corpus has good examples too, like this one:

_As he hung Father Carl's suit back in the closet, Dominic hummed a song that the dead priest had used to whistle frequently, "Do Nothing till You Hear from Me."_ The Variations: a Novel;  Donatich, John  - the novel dates from 2012 and John Donatich is the Director of Yale University Press, and not a semi-literate novice.


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## Loob

TT, I think that your second example has the verb "to use": _the anti-aircraft gun had been used by Serbian forces...._

And the first one sounds to me as if it's deliberately employing the language of an earlier time.

For me, semi-modal _* used to *_is still only usable in the simple past tense*.*


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## Thomas Tompion

Loob said:


> TT, I think that your second example has the verb "to use": _the anti-aircraft gun had been used by Serbian forces...._
> 
> And the first one sounds to me as if it's deliberately employing the language of an earlier time.
> 
> For me, semi-modal _* used to *_is still only usable in the simple past tense*.*


Thanks for this, dear Loob.  I'd hoped I was alive to that possibility, for obviously there are many examples of that.

I think you are right about the Serbian forces, but I see you'll give me the first example but only as a deliberate archaism, so we have a chink there.

I also stand by the American one about the priest - I don't think the dead priest can have used the song to whistle.

I realise that you'll take a lot of persuading.

Here's another, just for fun -_ I walked silently, testing every step I took on the rough paths, just as I had used to walk with my mother in the woods near tanjel_.  Peace and War: Growing up in Fascist Italy. Newby, Wanda. London: Picador, 1991. 

Wrong use of 'to use'?  I don't think so.  Deliberate archaism?  I can see that these things come upon authors when they start talking about their mothers.

Of course when we use anterior tenses, we go back in time, and that may tempt us to use old forms.


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## AnythingGoes

Thomas Tompion said:


> I was sceptical about the view that the form didn't exist in modern American English and, certainly, the American Corpus has good examples too, like this one:
> 
> _As he hung Father Carl's suit back in the closet, Dominic hummed a song that the dead priest had used to whistle frequently, "Do Nothing till You Hear from Me."_ The Variations: a Novel;  Donatich, John  - the novel dates from 2012 and John Donatich is the Director of Yale University Press, and not a semi-literate novice.





Thomas Tompion said:


> I also stand by the American one about the priest - I don't think the dead priest can have used the song to whistle.


I wondered if Donatich might have been a British ex-pat, but his education, at least, was all American. The excerpt looks distinctly old-fashioned to me, though. I wonder if overexposure to the dusty confines of a university publishing house may have tilted his usage towards some rather antique forms.

A friend's father directed a major American university press until the mid-Eighties. My friend tells me that his father was one of the many fusty American editors who rejected the famously descriptivist Webster's Third New International Dictionary, going so far as to purchase a copy of the second edition for each of his editors when the third was released. This tells me that at least one university press clung to historical usages as long as it could.


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## Thomas Tompion

AnythingGoes said:


> I wondered if Donatich might have been a British ex-pat, but his education, at least, was all American. The excerpt looks distinctly old-fashioned to me, though. I wonder if overexposure to the dusty confines of a university publishing house may have tilted his usage towards some rather antique forms.
> 
> A friend's father directed a major American university press until the mid-Eighties. My friend tells me that his father was one of the many fusty American editors who rejected the famously descriptivist Webster's Third New International Dictionary, going so far as to purchase a copy of the second edition for each of his editors when the third was released. This tells me that at least one university press clung to historical usages as long as it could.


Thanks for this, AnythingGoes.  It made me smile, and anything which does that in these hard times is a godsend.

We can't do more this end than produce examples from contemporary writing and if it seems that the old forms still scatter dust and cobwebs in the minds of the unpersuaded, it's hard to know whether this is not just their own reactions to a form which they had come to regard as out of date.

There are plenty of other examples in the COCA, but I've got supper to cook.


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## Thomas Tompion

I don't know if this link will work generally: it's a page from *An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Part 2* By F. Th Visser, which dates from 1963.

What it says, in a word, among other things, is that the preterite (_used to go_) is now preferred to _had used to go_.

So what you have in front of you in this post is a rare example of a member producing evidence for the case against himself.

I think it's the purest mashed potato, of course, because the different tenses express different ideas, and I don't buy the argument that people no longer wish to express the second idea.


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## Loob




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## AnythingGoes

Thomas Tompion said:


> I don't know if this link will work generally: it's a page from *An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Part 2* By F. Th Visser, which dates from 1963.
> 
> What it says, in a word, among other things, is that the preterite (_used to go_) is now preferred to _had used to go_.
> 
> So what you have in front of you in this post is a rare example of a member producing evidence for the case against himself.
> 
> I think it's the purest mashed potato, of course, because the different tenses express different ideas, and I don't buy the argument that people no longer wish to express the second idea.


Thanks for the link. I'd used to be unaware of the distinction, or did I use to be? I'm afraid I still can't feel it.


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## Thomas Tompion

AnythingGoes said:


> I'd used to be unaware of the distinction[...]


Remember that it's an anterior past tense of habit.

If you've established a time in the past and wish to describe a habit of a time previous to that, then this is the form for you, should you happen to agree with me.

I'm saying that your sentence won't do, AnythingGoes, but you probably know that already.

_The turnkey noticed that his hands went often to his trembling lips again, as they had used to do when he first came in._ Dickens, Little Dorrit.


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## AnythingGoes

Thomas Tompion said:


> Remember that it's an anterior past tense of habit.
> 
> If you've established a time in the past and wish to describe a habit of a time previous to that, then this is the form for you, should you happen to agree with me.
> 
> I'm saying that your sentence won't do, AnythingGoes, but you probably know that already.
> 
> _The turnkey noticed that his hands went often to his trembling lips again, as they had used to do when he first came in._ Dickens, Little Dorrit.


I doubt I'll ever use the construction, but it definitely adds a nuance. Looking at the examples I realized that I do understand it; it's just not part of my working grammar.


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## h_trismegistus

Thomas Tompion said:


> ...
> 
> _The turnkey noticed that his hands went often to his trembling lips again, as they had used to do when he first came in._ Dickens, Little Dorrit.





> ...





Thomas Tompion said:


> _ I walked silently, testing every step I took on the rough paths, just as I had used to walk with my mother in the woods near tanjel_.



I found this topic so interesting after I came across it whilst “Googling” this particular “had used to” construction, that I had to sign up for an account here to chime in.

It’s occurred to me that in the first quote from Thomas above, because the sentence contains extra information in the form of the words “often“ and “again”, the habitual quality is already present in the content of the sentence without the need for a habitual aspect to the tense.

_The turnkey noticed that his hands went often to his trembling lips again, as they had when he first came in._

The second quote, lacking this extra information, is not quite as clear when edited to this alternate construction, but it seems rather versatile and ambiguous enough to work in this situation, and I have indeed often heard such a construction used in spoken English.

_I walked silently, testing every step I took on the rough paths, just as I had with my mother in the woods near Tanjel._

Kind of an abbreviated, ambiguous past perfect/habitual construction.  Am I totally off the mark?


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## JLP222

I always say 'had used to ....' as this is proper English. Over the last few years we see the Americanised version 'did used to.....', which makes my skin crawl. 'Had used to' is certainly NOT obsolete.


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## JLP222

AnythingGoes said:


> Thanks for the link. I'd used to be unaware of the distinction, or did I use to be? I'm afraid I still can't feel it.


Definitely 'Had used to be'.


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## Tappahannock

Interesting discussion.

The <Too long, didn't read>  of my perspective as primarily, nowadays, an editor of both popular and literary fiction, and a writer of the latter: 

Legitimate instances of "had used to" are uncommon (but exist) in everyday conversation, and the "had" is often omitted even in those. They also occur in past-tense narrative, where they are not always stylistically or "informationally" interchangeable with a simple "used to." In that context they are obligatory for some instances of reported speech, a.k.a. indirect dialogue, and may also convey critical nuance in direct narrative.

< Edited to write out abbreviation in full. Cagey, moderator >​

Some observations in more depth:

*"Had used to" as a tic*. I've known Americans of a generation before mine who misused "had used to" conversationally in the style of a double negation like _don't want no trouble_. An example: "Back whenever [read 'when'] we lived in Texas, we had used to go sit by the railroad tracks." The "had" is inappropriate there, an incorrect attempt to amplify or affirm the sense of past conveyed by "used to," for two reasons: first, because it relates something done habitually _at the same time_ as they lived in Texas, not before that time, the way the "had" implies; and second, because what it relates remains true in the present—"used to" being a present-time construct using past tense—namely, the fact that the "they" in question are people who used to go sit by the railroad tracks. I'm not sure whether that tic was more generational or regional.

*Disappearance of past perfect in millennial American writing and speech.* Over the last four years, I've edited hundreds of chapters and a number of full books of fiction from aspiring American writers of both popular and literary fiction. _The single most striking consistency_ in all of that writing has been the extreme paucity of past perfect in past-tense narrative from writers born after, I suppose, around 1980. In fact, I've noticed the same thing in some of those writers' conversation. I believe the distinction may be lacking or irrelevant in their mental model of experiential time, and I've speculated (though without evidence) that beyond a failure of primary schooling, it might be a result of learning most of their language from screens rather than books. There's much less need for past perfect in action-focused, present-moment conversation, which constitutes nearly all of what one sees in screenplays. (Lack of past perfect might also represent simple impatience with such a nuance.)

Here's a typical example, lightly disguised from the original:

1. John felt sick to his stomach. His dead father battered him often, so he quailed at the slightest threat.

My immediate, unconsidered reaction to the use of "battered" (simple past) instead of "had battered" was that the father must be one persistent zombie mofo. But my brain is keenly aware of temporal relationships. There are probably many readers, especially of the writer's generation, who don't make a distinction in degrees of past, and thus wouldn't notice—and might not even understand. I try to explain to them that past-tense narrative generally works like a ratchet that's constantly moving forward to stay in the moment—the experiential or narrative moment, which two sometimes coincide, and may vary in breadth—and that anything occurring before that moment needs to be labeled as such using past perfect.​​Another common class of example is "We thought we made it" in place of "We thought we'd made it."​
So an absence of "had used to" in fictional narrative may sometimes be a symptom of absence of past perfect overall.

*It's not that special. But it's a little special, this had used to.* "Used to swim" is roughly synonymous with "swam often" or "swam now and then." They're usually interchangeable in meaning, but not always in temporal perspective. Some annotated examples with and without.

2. (conversation) Hi, Mary. I saw Laura last night. She said she heard from that agent. In fact, she's heard from several agents lately. And she said she used to follow that website you mentioned.

I could have used past perfect, but instead I expanded the current moment to include the night before. It's conveying present information, so it's acceptable to use simple past and present perfect even for the reported speech.​
3. (conversation) Hi, Mary. You know, I ran into Laura about six weeks ago. She said she'd heard from that agent the two of you discussed. In fact, she'd lately heard from a number of agents. And she said she used to follow that website you mentioned the last time you talked.

The first two news items require past perfect, principally because they're reported speech. But it's also true that Laura's hearing from the agent would be regarded as anterior to the moment of talking six weeks ago, a factor that in itself would already qualify both statements for past perfect. The third news item is also reported speech and _could have used_ past perfect ("had used to"), but doing so would sound fussy. It's just as true today as it was six weeks ago that Laura used to follow the website, and "used to" is a condition that exists in the present.​
4. (fictional narrative) She said she had the same fascination with night-snow, that as a girl she'd used to watch it from her bedroom window.

It's "she'd used to" principally because it's indirect dialogue, also known as reported speech. As a writer, you can sort of get away with "she used to watch it," especially when "as a girl" has arguably shifted the timeframe to past-of-(the narrative moment in)-past. Technically "she" _should_ have the "d," but to some it will sound distractingly fussy. Either way, you have to be careful about breaking the time relationship within the narrative, which is something I often see the aforementioned millennial American writers do. To readers with a keen sense of narrative time, it's a jolt.​
5. (narrative) The boys went down to First Dam. They swam there often. They used to go at night.
​I would avoid this altogether, writing instead "They liked to go at night." Why? This "used to" disrupts the time perspective—is it "used to" relative to today or "used to" relative to the narrative present told in simple past? Technically, there's no question: it's "used to" relative to today. This is what Robert Binnick (see Gillebride's post above) is getting at. Suddenly you're interrupting past tense narrative with a present-feeling construct. There are many words in simple past narration that bend the time perspective toward the present—_now_, _this_, _these_, _here_, and others—but outside of direct dialogue, I draw the line at _used to _that is not _had used to_. Some published writers of popular fiction do not draw such a line, and happily write simple past "used to" in past-tense narrative.​
6. (narrative) The boys missed going down to First Dam. They'd used to swim there at night, but the installation of a sewage treatment plant upstream [had] put an end to that.

Here it's unambiguously "had used to," because there was a time in the past when they used to, and that time is no more—even within the context of the past-tense narrative, that time is no more. Thus past perfect is required on temporal grounds alone, with no element of reported speech. I softened it with the contraction—the meaning is identical, of course, but some readers' reactions will not be. The bracketed "had" is optional on the principle that one does not always apply "had" to every verb in an anterior past passage, once the timeshift is introduced by one or two instances.​


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