Teacher Discussion Forums

COCA
didn't use to 24
didn't used to 99

BNC
didn't use to 17
didn't used to 24

So the spelling with the 'd' is more common even in British English.

Frankly, just write whichever you feel like. Both appear to be legitimate.

So the American editor is some kind of religious fundamentalist loony who believes he belongs to a superior caste to the rest of mankind! Do you hang out on the streets handing out leaflets like your confessional counterparts.

but realize they are both decidedly descriptive (although Columbia is much better). As such, they are't especially helpful for making final decisions on the job. So describing how the language works doesn't help you make linguistic decisions? Why don't you get somebody to program you a Random Silly...

Is there any difference in pronunciation between didn't use to and didn't used to?

Please keep us posted on how it pans out.

'ain't' as standard usage is an American rather than a British phenomenon.

I suspect it's one of those words that has changed it's meaning. The modern meaning of 'superficial, without depth' is given by the SOED as dating from the 20th century. Before that the word was simply a synonym for easy. The BNC which goes from 1980-1993 does have 'facile' used in the older sense a...

The 'ain't' is what tells us it's used for effect which is presumably why the Hansard transcriber chose to use 'gonna' for the spelling. Remember Hansard is a transcript of speeches and it is quite common for us to say 'gonna', even though the correct spelling is 'going to'.

The quote from Hansard is a clear example of informal language being used deliberately for effect. Actually the reason I chose the Texas Law Review is that Brian Garner is the editor. I agree lots of decisions to be made, and not necessarily by the same person; somebody chooses the corpus, somebody ...

As woodcutter has said there is no agreement on the terminology. I don't know how many the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language lists but I would think around twenty. The traditonal terminology is fine for nouns, adjectives, interjections, verbs (to some extent), and to some extent for preposti...

one reason being that they are usually very careful to include no "?" moments in their own chatter. (The modelling may be subconcious to some degree). You're putting the cart before the horse here. ? means I wouldn't use it but I can't definitely say its incorrect. Descriptivists make judgment call...

It's not easy to select a corpus of "formal English". The British National Corpus divides it's entries by register and so does the American Corpus at BYU. Now judgement calls need to be made. However those judgement calls are going to be based on evidence; too many prescriptivists simply make state...

The main problem is that there is no agreed terminology. There is no agreement on what the parts of speech are and what part of speech each word is, nor on how many tenses there are in English (most authorities claim two but the CGEL considers there to be four as it doesn't think the Perfect is an a...

'himself', 'themselves', 'themself' are all correct. My preference is in that order.

The ETAQ document contained some incredibly glaring errors. won't as an adverb for example.

It appears the average twelve-year-old could have done better. That the author of the piece should be a practising English teacher is worrying.