Tentative offering of a Gmail Group


(To become familiar with Gmail groups and satisfy my
curiosity, I have formed one called "English Language",
which you can find at
http://groups.google.com/group/english-topics/ . To access
that group, you would be asked to become a member of Google
Groups. Any Google Groups member can read the group, but to
post to it you need to be a member of the group itself. To
become a member of the group, you need to be invited by me.
For the time being, I would like to be the only member,
making the group in effect moderated: People who want to
post to it would send their submission to me, and I would
post it in the group if the content seemed somehow related
to an English language topic.

If anyone would like to help with the moderation, and will
promise to post nothing unrelated to an English language
topic, I will be happy to invite them to be a group member.

If no one is interested, I may still use the "group" as a
place to soliloquize.)

Here is a copy of the only posting so far:

Dictionaries tell us that "used to" means "was accustomed
to", but discussions in another forum have shown that some
people reject that definition, and hold that "used to" is a
modal auxiliary unrelated to individual meanings of the
words "used" and "to"..

Support for the dictionary definition is found in occasional
modern occurrences of the verb "use" in the sense "be
accustomed to", in tenses other than simple past, and also
with the "used" and the "to" separated by other words..

In a translation of Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina_ (Part Two,
xxvi, fourth line) I have recently noticed the following
usages in the past perfect::

With the coming of spring he went to a spa abroad,
as he had used to, to recover his health [...]

and (Part Two, viii, third page)

They collected a whole basketful of mushrooms; even
Lili found a wood mushroom. What had used to
happen was that Miss Hull would find one and show
her; [...]

The title page of this translation of _Anna Karenina_ says,
"The modern American translation by Joel Carmichael". The
translation is copyright © 1960 by Bantam Books.

I, for one, regard "use" in the phrase "used to" as just
another verb, some of whose tenses have become dormant for
the time being, leaving usually only the simple past tense.
I would favor restoration of the dormant tenses, making it
acceptable to say things like,

"After I retire, I will use to visit the park more
often",

"The man who uses to deliver our paper was late
this morning", and

"A common trait of teenagers is their using to view
their parents with tolerant amusement".
.

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