I wish I may, I wish I might...

The problem
Today's Toronto Star had the following headline:

Good Samaritan law may have saved son, mom says

There is only one way to interpret this:
A Good Samaritan law exists
The mother's son is still alive
It is possible that it is thanks to this law that the son is still alive

In fact, on reading the article, it became clear that:
No such law exists (in this case protecting those who call emergency services about a drug overdose from themselves being charged with drug possession)
The son died

If such a law had existed, the son might have lived.

The headline made it sound like it was a good-news story when in fact it was anything but. 

Do not confuse "may have" and "might have"
  People often use "may have" when what they mean is "might have". If a condition (an "if-clause") is either implicit or stated, what you need is "might have".

If you say
"These people may have survived", 
it means
"It is possible these people have survived (but we don't know for sure)".

If you say
"With better care, these people might have survived", 
it means
"They didn't survive. If they had had better care maybe they would have."

The solution
  If you are unsure whether to use "may" or "might", try recasting the sentence with "will" or "would".

If "would" conveys the meaning you want if you are expressing something certain, then "might" is the appropriate form for something less certain ("might" essentially means "would maybe").

So, to try this with the original headline:

"Good Samaritan law will have saved son" is clearly wrong
"Good Samaritan law would have saved son" makes more sense, but since we can't know for sure that it would have, "might" is the appropriate word to use.

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How we use to use use

The verb "use" used to be, well, used (maybe I should start this post over...).

Nowadays I can't say "I use to go to ballet classes 4 times a week", meaning "I do this habitually", although I could have said that from about 1400-1700 (not that I was dancing back then, though some mornings it feels like it). (The title of this post is not a mistake, but me being intentionally -- all right, you can say pretentiously -- archaic.)
This sense of "use" now occurs only in the past tense: "I used to go to ballet classes". In speech, this sounds exactly like the noun "use" plus "to" (YOOSS too). From this arise two problems:
1) Do not write "I use to", even though it sounds like that. Remember, "used" is in the past tense.
2) When you put this in the negative, you DON'T write "used". "I didn't use to go to ballet classes" is correct. It looks weird, but that's the correct version. Just as you wouldn't say "I didn't wanted to go", you can't say "I didn't used to go". "Didn't used to" is an extraordinarily common mistake, but it is a mistake nonetheless.

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