I just discovered that I'm not use to using used.:-)

[lish1936]

I discovered that punctuation has no "s" for plural, and I'm also befuddled as to when to add a "d" to use.

I used to be a spring chicken, now I'm an old hen.

or

I use to be an old hen, but now I'm a spring chicken.

Which use should be used? And what is the general rule? I googled it, but still couldn't find an answer that made sense to me.

Anyone?


Lillian

[deejay]

I think in your second example, "use" originally had a d on the end, but was dropped because people either got lazy or it's a regionalism. I see an incredible amount of laziness in writing--the capper was this morning, I picked up a bus bulletin, and it had the dates "for the week of Feb. 25 to 31". Uhh, I think Marilyn Vos Savant once said in her column it would be another 300 years before February would have 29 days in three years out of four, with 30 days in leap years. Has OCTA sent us a thousand years or so into the future?

Seriously, nobody seems to care if words are misspelled or misused--they think it's a mark of "creativity". Wrong! Writers of the past and present were/ are very creative, but they don't intentionally use incorrect spelling, grammar and punctuation, as well as incorrect usage. English teachers used to tell students that if one does not know how to spell or pronounce a word, know its meaning and usage, that word did not belong to them. Apparently they've stopped doing that.

[glorybee]

In the phrase "used to be", always put a 'd' on 'used'. It's not the way it's pronounced because the 'd' bumps up against the 't' in 'to'.

I suppose a trick to remember this is to consider that when you're writing "used to," you're writing about something that happened in the past. Hence, you'd write the past tense verb.

[lish1936]

Thanks, Jan.

Lillian