WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE!

OPINION: Should we say 'used to' or 'use to'? I give up

I reader asked me to explain the difference between used to and use to. I hadn't really thought about it before.

Used to is used when you mean formerly, or a while ago.

I used to buy the large popcorn container at the movie theater, but I slowly went broke.

Remember the good old days when we used to eat at restaurants?

But use to is used when the action didn't occur or when things have changed. When the sentence is a negative, you use use to.

I didn't use to like studying history.

I never use to miss an episode of "Kolchak: The Night Stalker."

One reason the two are confused is because they sound so similar. Used to sounds like use to. The d seems to morph into a t sound because it's followed by a t.

To add to the confusion, used can be a plain old verb:

The remote control can be used to assure you don't need to budge from the couch all day.

I thought I had this whole topic figured out. But then I foolishly looked in a few language books. First, I was happy to find that what Theodore M. Bernstein wrote in "The Careful Writer" was the same things I wrote. But he added that this usage of use to and used to "lacks grace in writing." Strike one.

And then Charles Harrington Elster, who wrote "The Accidents of Style," threw me off completely. He said he and Bryan A. Garner, who wrote "Garner's Modern American Usage," have a different philosophy about used to. They say used to is an "idiomatic phrase" that didn't need to change when the sentence is negative. So these men would be fine with these sentences:

I didn't used to like studying history.

I never used to miss an episode of "Kolchak: The Night Stalker."

Strike two and strike three.

So what do we do now? I'm going to heed Bernstein's advice and avoid the phrases altogether in writing. But I might still use it aloud, where no one will hear the difference.

NONSENSE

A Yiddish word I've been hearing a lot lately is mishigas.

It means craziness, foolishness, nonsense.

I found only 17 articles in The Washington Post using the word. And, funny, six of those articles were by the same writer (she used it about twice a year, according to the archives).

I wanted to describe its pronunciation, but online people said it in different ways. And it wasn't listed in Merriam-Webster or American Heritage Dictionary.

Let me know if you hear it.

GET YOUR JAB HERE

We know many people in the United States are wary of getting the coronavirus vaccine. I don't know how the people in Britain feel about it, but I don't like how they describe the vaccination. The shot there is described as a jab. They use phrases such as the jab rollout, the first dose of the jab, a jab blitz.

Their health secretary, Matt Hancock, said on Twitter, "We are defeating this vaccine jab by jab."

Doesn't a shot sound so much better?

NEWS CLICHES AGAIN

This column is on a sort of time delay. I send one in to my editor on the same day the earlier one publishes. So I've received lots of emails about your least favorite news cliches, but I won't write about them until next week.

I can't believe I forgot to include my favorite news cliche: shrouded.

The process is shrouded in secrecy.

The issue is shrouded in uncertainty.

A shroud is what corpses are wrapped in. The verb to shroud means to obscure or disguise. But its use in those phrases in the examples seems a little excessive. It's shrouded in pretension.

Also, have you noticed that any time a politician is an independent, he is fiercely independent?

And I would like to propose a moratorium on this phrase: We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

It means being able to do two things at once. Why not just say that? I don't hear the phrase every day, but once one person says it, you hear people say it all day. It goes in waves.

I always thought the phrase was first used to describe Gerald Ford, when he was said to be unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Today I learned and blushed at its original use with Ford.

In "Who Said What, Where, and When," a book by Ralph Keyes, the author mentions Lyndon Johnson said something similar to that about Ford. But Johnson didn't use the word walk. Journalists at the time didn't want to use the word Johnson used. I don't want to use it either. See whether you can figure out what he really said:

"Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't [pass gas] and chew gum at the same time." The reporters decided to use walk, instead.

A phrase similar to the gentler one goes all the way back to 1907. Some fool was quoted in the Iowa City (Iowa) Daily Press as saying, "A woman cannot talk and chew gum at the same time, anyhow."

A Los Angeles Times article in 1926 used this description of Will Rogers: "The only man in the world who can chew gum and talk sense at the same time, was an exceedingly busy man at his mansion in Beverly Hills."

Then a Maryland newspaper in 1956 used this sentence: "He can't walk and chew gum at the same time." A phrase was born.

And I wish it would go away now.

Sources include Merriam-Webster, Daily Writing Tips, Best Life, Daily Mail, The Washington Post, BarryPopik.com, "The Accidents of Style" by Charles Harrington Elster, "The Careful Writer by Theodore M. Bernstein, The Daily Mail, The Guardian. Reach Bernadette at

bkwordmonger@gmail.com

Upcoming Events