Is "had used" grammatically correct, or should it just be "used"?
2023-04-18
This is what goPenpal answered
Yes, "had used" is a correct grammatical construction, and it isn't necessarily redundant.
The term "had" is what's known as the past perfect tense. We use the past perfect when we want to show that an action was completed prior to another action that occurred in the past. It's often used to clarify the order of events or to emphasize the completion of an action before something else happened.
For example, let's say you're talking about a friend who borrowed your car. You might say, "By the time I got the car back, my friend had used up all the gas." In this sentence, the past perfect ("had used") clarifies that the action of using up the gas happened before the action of the friend returning the car.
On the other hand, if we simply said, "My friend used all the gas," it doesn't give us the same sense of time and sequence.
So, in short, the term "had" in "had used" is not always redundant, but rather functions as a way to clearly establish the sequence of actions in the past.
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