usual [ME] The English words use and usual are both medieval and derived from Latin usus ‘a use’. People have used drugs or been drug users since the late 1920s, although they could equally be said to abuse [LME], ‘use in the wrong way’, them. User-friendly is recorded from 1972. The usual suspects comes from a line in the Humphrey Bogart film Casablanca (1942): ‘Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.’ Utility [LME] is from the same root.