2

Came across some examples like this:

He had not used to be sad in the king's presence, but conformed to the rules of the court, which would admit no sorrows...(Matthew Henry Study Bible)

Is it correct? What's then the difference b/n " didn't use to be" and " hadn't used to be"?

How wide-spread is this construction?

Marshmellow
  • 21
  • 2
  • 3
    This is biblical material, and that's consciously archaic. Sometimes it's attempted by non-archaic speakers and then they hafta make up stuff like they think they talked in the old days. Here someone has reached back to the _used to_ past habitual construction, which uses no auxiliary (_He used to shop there_ but not *_He had used to shop there_), and used _have_ instead of _do_ for its past tense, mistaking the first word of the idiom _used_ as a past participle and the construction as a perfect. Perhaps that was true for some writers at some point, but it's no longer correct English. – John Lawler Aug 31 '22 at 12:42
  • 3
    The negative of _used to_ is formed in Modern English with _do_-support: _He didn't used to shop there_. Not with _have_. Certainly not in the past tense _had_. – John Lawler Aug 31 '22 at 12:42
  • 2
    Does b/n mean between? – Yosef Baskin Aug 31 '22 at 13:03
  • 1
    @JohnLawler thank you for the response) I've always been sure we use "used to" in Past Simple and only there, so when I saw a sentence with "hadn't used to+V" I got extremely puzzled and thought that was a total mistake. Then I did some searching on google ngram and got double puzzled finding out such examples do exist, even in books dated 2013, 2017 and so on. Couldn't help asking for clarification)) –  Aug 31 '22 at 13:45
  • I don't see how anyone could tell the difference in *speech* anyway, but I don't know whether the past tense should be *He didn't **use** to do that* or *He didn't **used** to do that*. Logic tells me we should only inflect ***one*** verb for past tense, and that's already been done with ***did*** (cf *He didn't **have** to do it*). But I assume most instances in [this NGram](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=didn%27t+used+to+do%2Cdidn%27t+use+to+do&year_start=1919&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3) match the context - if anything, usage is gradually shifting towards ***used***. – FumbleFingers Aug 31 '22 at 15:29
  • Related (duplicate?) [What's the negation of "I used to be"? Surely not "I didn't used to be"?](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8816/whats-the-negation-of-i-used-to-be-surely-not-i-didnt-used-to-be) – FumbleFingers Aug 31 '22 at 15:32
  • @JohnLawler Your comment seems to constitute a reasonable answer. That in itself is reason to keep the question open as a respectaable question about English usage. – Anton Aug 31 '22 at 20:55
  • 1
    *had used* is obviously pluperfect: one can say “he used to do one thing at that time, but he *had* used to do another.” The sentence describes his practice **before** some reference event. – Anton Sherwood Sep 01 '22 at 00:14

1 Answers1

0

While this might have been acceptable in an antiquated version of English, you won't ever see this in modern English. Instead, you might see something like:

He wasn't used to being sad in the King's presence...

swmcdonnell
  • 5,433
  • 6
  • 11
  • -1 That does not correctly express the meaning of the indicated phrase. Rather it would be something like "*He had not usually been sad in the King's presence...*" – David Siegel Dec 19 '22 at 19:11