1. The English language has some very strange words and phrases you are sure to see at
some point. For instance, the word read. Depending on how you pronounce this word,
determines if it is in the present or past tense. Today I want to talk about a phrase that
does the job of three phrases. It changes its meaning completely depending on how you
use it. The phrase is only two words; used to.
Let’s first look at the phrase when it is used as an idiom (there’s those pesky idioms
again). If you add a “to be” verb to the phrase, you can use it to explain that you are
accustomed to doing something. Here are some examples.
“I am used to getting up early in the morning.”
“I could get used to getting up early in the morning.”
“I am getting used to reading examples of English sentences.”
Because the speaker has done these things many times, he is accustomed to doing them,
meaning they are very familiar to him. Another way to use “used to” is as a verb. Many
English learners get this usage confused with the previous example. Look at the
following sentences.
“He used to go to the café every day.”
“There used to be a restaurant here before they built this gas station.”
“Used to” here means something that was happening or commonly done in the past, but is
no longer true. We have looked at the two most common uses for the phrase “used to.”
There is one more usage I want to discuss, which is also common, but not usually
confused with the other two uses. Here is the example.
“This is the tool that is used to fix her broken washing machine.”
In this case, the message communicated is that some thing has the ability to complete a
task (the tool fixes the machine). When read the sentence, it looks like the same phrase
we used before. However, it is actually a combination of a verb (used) and an infinitive
(to fix). So, it’s not really the phrase “used to,” but two separate sentence parts, verb +
infinitive.
So, get used to using this phrase, because it is used to help you communicate better than
you used to.
