Used to...

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:30 AM -0400 8/13/03, sagehen wrote:
>I keep being struck by what seems to me the oddity of the frequently used
>expression, "didn't used to (do sthg)."  Treating, IOW, "used to" as
>invariable.  I would say:
>"I used to do sthg" or
>"I am used to doing sthg" or
>"I did use to do sthg" or
>"I used not to do sthg" or
>"I didn't use to...",
>  but not "I didn't used to do sthg."   In speech, of course, it may be hard
>to say what spelling is intended by the speaker, but I see "didn't used to"
>in print in ordinary narrative discourse, not just dialogue, very often. Is
>this entirely idiosyncratic?
>A. Murie

I've always used this in class as a nice example of something you can
say but not write.  Neither "I didn't use to" nor "I didn't used to"
seems possible to me, but *saying* "I didn't useta" is impeccable.
It's sort of the orthographic equivalent of some of those "Where the
rules break down" cases in language, e.g. "Either he or I am/is/are
going", "one of my friends' mother/mothers", "Few of them left,
did/didn't they?".  (In each case, the options are all between flawed
and impossible for me.)

Larry