This is the sort of thing that will interest those who are interested in this sort of thing.
 
Lawrence Block writes, in A Drop of the Hard Stuff, c.2011,
 
"There was a boy I grew up with in the Bronx", I remembered, "and we lost track of each other completely when my family moved away. And then I ran into him a couple of times years later."
 
"And he'd taken the other path."
 
"He had", I said. "He was no great success at it, but that's where his life led him."
 
When he writes that 'he had taken the other path', rather than 'he took the other path', he tries to put 'had' in front of an irregular past tense verb 'take', thus forcing the irregular past participle, 'taken'. 
 
Having done that, he forces 'had-for-did' in the next line.
 
Had he written, 'And he took the other path', the reply would have been, as it should have been, 'He did'.
 
That's what happened, believe it or not.
 
.brad.17june11.
 
(If you're going to argue against this interpretation, you're going to have to put 'had' in front of 'led' in the last line:)


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