I remember being quite put out by "iced cream" when I encountered the example in a historical linguistics class when I was in early graduate school -- I had this comfortable sense of righteous indignation at people who were writing "ice tea," and then the example contextualized the entire thing at the expense of my inner prescriptivist. Darn history and its humility-inducing ways.
For what it's worth, the historical COHA corpus has an 18:2 tilt in favor of "didn't use to," with the bulk of "use"-examples being 1890 or earlier and all two "used"-examples being later. But those are very small numbers, and at least one of them is a potentially false hit, so I'm not sure how much that tells us. For modern English, COCA has 2:2, so it's a wash. Google-searching gets you 123:73 (million), keeping in mind that Googling gets you tons of false hits of various sorts (the results only mean much if the factors causing the false hits are relatively equivalent for both of the things you're searching for).
My brain wants to treat "used to" as a fully fused form, analogous to "supposed to," and since I think "I wasn't suppose to do that" looks odd, I don't want to write "I didn't use to do that." But the numbers seem to be slightly in favor of the "didn't use to" variant, and that ice cream effect will probably tilt things further.
--- Bill Spruiell
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of STAHLKE, HERBERT F [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 11:37 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: didn't use(d) to
Whether or not there is an approved spelling, this looks like a case of the “ice cream” phenomenon, where a final dental stop (/d/ or /t/) gets deleted before a consonant-initial word. Other examples are
skim milk
ice tea
stuff peppers
etc.
The two spellings would probably be pronounced the same, without the final /d/.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dick Veit
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 10:45 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: didn't use(d) to
Two quotations from recently encountered novels:
"There's bad blood now. Didn't use to be like that..." (dialog in Alan Furst's Spies of the Balkans, p. 102, Kindle edition).
"She didn't used to smoke around the kids..." (Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, p. 126, Kindle edition).
So which is it, didn't use to or didn't used to?
A few usage guides I consulted prescribe "didn't use to," but others say both are standard. In my own writing, I probably would have used "didn't used to."
On the one hand, "used to/didn't use to" would parallel other verbs (laughed/didn't laugh), but, on the other, we're talking about a quasimodal, and with modals we can expect significant variations from other verbs. Pronunciation is no help--both "use to" and "used to" are spoken identically as "useta."
Thoughts?
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