Which of these forms is the accepted correct usage.

Did you used to play football?
Did you use to play football.

I was preparing some class materials and I wrote "used" without thinking. Then I noticed that one of the text books examples used "use".

Thinking about it logically (always a mistake with language) it seemed to me that "use" makes more sense. A couple of colleagues agreed, but then I did some googling on "did you used to <verb>" and "did you use to <verb>" and while both are common the "used to" form seems to be a little over twice as commonly used as the "use to" form. This applied regardless of which <verb> I inserted.

Anybody got any opinions?

Well, in formal written English it should be Did you use to play football? Compare for example: (1) Did you watch TV last night? and (2) Did you go to the store? The tense is marked only in the auxiliary verb do. The confusion comes about because of the reduced form of to after use, /'justə/, which is pronounced by many speakers of English the same as in I used to go to the East Coast often. It's comparable to the reduced form of have /əv/ which many people write as of rather than 've. In a ESL/EFL class I'd stress the formal case, and if the students were sufficiently advanced give them a little explanation why as above.

quote:

Did you use to play football.

But I would say, "You used to play football, didn't you?"

The thing is that, using Google to provide the corpus shows the erronious form at approximately twice the usage of the correct one. If two thirds of the world's English speakers prefer the "wrong" form doesn't it de facto become the "right" form?

Didn't you at some time play football?

If two thirds of the world's English speakers prefer the "wrong" form doesn't it de facto become the "right" form?

I think it's pretty much a matter of confused spelling rather than grammar. It manifests itself as a grammatical error when viewed. The two different phrases sound alike to most speakers of English. As a linguist, I wouldn't say that either form is wrong. I'd simply cites the statistics. As a pedagogue, teaching English as a foreign (or second) language. I'd go with the use to, explain why it's grammatical and why the other form shouldn't be used in formal writing, because "right" or "wrong" it may lose you whatever you're trying to get: e.g., hired, respected. It may not be far, but it's the way the world works, and as an educator I think its your duty to teach your students how to write formal English.

When I was "practice teaching" -- the last stage before certification as a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages -- my supervisor and I were visiting one of my students, a girl from Venezuela. During our visit I suggested that she make friends with local American girls and practice her English with them.

We heard her say, "I used to do that."

Instantly and simultaneously, the supervisor and I "pounced on her" and asked, "Why did you stop?"
She looked terrified and confused, and she said, "I did not stop. I use to do that now."

Thus I learned from my student that we put the past tense marker "-ed" on the auxiliary verb "use" but its pronunciation is hidden by the "t" of "to."

My question is, how do native speakers learn such details when they are rarely if ever discussed in school?

My question is, how do native speakers learn such details when they are rarely if ever discussed in school?

Not only do they learn this stuff, they do so without conscious effort, whereas learning a language after you're about 10 years old is filled with nothing but effort. (And I know because I am currently taking Japanese lessons as a benefit at work.) There's a whole field of research in linguistics called language acquisition that's devoted to this question.

Has anyone been able to identify what brain function ceases, rendering language acquisition difficult past youth? Or is it an increase in hormonal activity of some sort that renders us less facile at learning? Might a reversal be possible, Flowers for Algernon style?

Has anyone been able to identify what brain function ceases

I remember reading something about that myelination being completed during the time of acquisition, so maybe folks could learn a foreign language easily. Adults could probably learn another language easily if they were distracted by life, work, and such.

I learned in a recent ESL theory class that there is still a lot of controversy around whether there is a critical period for language learning (say before 10 years old).

MWDEU says most writers write "did... use to". They say that in American English, "did... used to" is an error, but that some British commentators find it acceptable.

imo, if two thirds of the world's English speakers really do prefer "did... used to", then it's the right form in the speech in which it's preferred. That doesn't mean it's right in all kinds of speech. Anyway in speech they sound identical.

I am late to the party on this question, but "did you used to" sounds so wrong to me, and I'd only say (or write) "did you use to."

When I put "did you used to" and "did you use to" into Google, I got about the same number of results for each. Where did you get the two to one statistic, Bob? Still, I can't even imagine the two phrases being equal in Google.

Here on the frontier, we have coined a newish word that eliminated this awkward situation. I "yoost" to use "use" and "used" with hesitant certainty.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
When I put "did you used to" and "did you use to" into Google, I got about the same number of results for each. Where did you get the two to one statistic, Bob? Still, I can't even imagine the two phrases being equal in Google.

Try it with a verb added. Here are the results for "go", google.co.uk first then google.com

Did you use to go 15,700/570
Did you used to go 152,000/152,000

When I put "Did you used to go" into Google, I get 99,400 hits. When I put "did you use to go" into Google, I get 44,700 hits.

Can you post a link to your results pages? These are mine.
did you use to go
did you used to go

Bob, click my links above. I did. Indeed, there is some variance. Yours shows 41,800 for "did you use to go" and 114,000 for "did you used to go." Mine, on the other hand, shows 99,400 for " did you used to go" and 44,700 for the same phrase using "use to."

This is bizarre. When I click on your links I get 150,000 for "used" and 15,000 for "use", and on my links I get 540 for "use" and 160,000 for used.

Sometimes Google baffles me.

Sometimes Google baffles me.

I've read somewhere that Google tailors its results based on your search history, location, and other information.

I get 41.8K and 114K ghits respectively.

I thought all Google hits were the same for everyone, though of course it would differ from country to country. Interestingly, when I click my links now, they are different. The first is 96,800 and the second is 43,100.

OEDILF really did something funny a few years back. The site was nearing 1,000,000 hits; it maybe even reached that mark because I remember congratulating CJ. Then suddenly the hits went way down; right now it's at 7,860. I'll never understand that.

I'll never understand that.

Google constantly tweaks the algorithm they use for PageRank (link).

Web page "Hits" or "Visitors" counters are generally nonsense. The local civic club uses a counter I wrote a decade ago, an animated GIF that I encourage you to behold, perhaps in amused wonder, then copy, distribute and use, at:
http://larkwood.org/

I own an ISP, and my customers can use one of many styles, or none, and can set the initital value, the increment-by value, and the time window for the represented count. Some services offer certified counters for those billing for hits. All are subject to all common counting and limit errors --- remember when Bill Gates scoffed at the suggestion anyone would ever want more than 640kb memory? Now I get single files over 27gb in size. Makes me blue, Ray.