When is "some" used as plural and when is it used as singular?
What is the negative form of "I used to be"? I often hear "I didn't used to be" but that sounds awfully wrong in my ears.
What's the negation of "I used to be"? Surely not "I didn't used to be"?
I am trying to find out if this question is correct. Did Wang Bo used to be awkward? Should I write "use to be" instead of "used to be," or is "used to be" correct in this sentence?
The qualification née is typically used to signify the name a woman previously had, most likely before her marriage. However, today I've seen it in a Spiegel article applied to a company name: When
word usage - Can "née" be used for entities other than people ...
These make up the vast majority of hits for 'can help doing something' in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. In the sentence given though, help is quite definitely a verb, and used in an affirmative context, so it would be best to have either a plain infinitival or to -infinitival following it.
However, the next occurrence (from Ohio/Missouri in 1917) used the hyphenated form, teen-agers, and for the entire period, teen-ager [s] (12) and teen agers (11) appeared in almost exactly the same number of articles. The spelling teenagers also appeared during this early period, although only twice.
I have used cocaine. I took cocaine at least once sometime in the past. I was using cocaine. In the past, I was a habitual user of cocaine. EDIT: As the comment says, this can also mean a process in the past, e.g. "I was using cocaine when the accident happened" can mean "I was not looking at the road since I was snorting cocaine." I have been using cocaine. Starting some time in the past, and ...