It Ain't No Use

[Peg Herring]

The irony of college football games introduced with a song by one of those hat-wearin' good old boys whose grammar should keep him out of higher education apparently escapes most people, but it bugs me.

I can give you the sociological explanation for "ain't," and I even understand it. Contractions, which are natural to every language over time, follow a general pattern of combining the verb with the negative: you aren't, he won't, they didn't. For some reason, the first person negative contraction is correctly formed with the pronoun, not the verb: I'm not. "Ain't" is the popular override of a "proper" designation that doesn't follow logic. Of course, once "ain't" came along, people began to use it with all the pronouns, simplifying everything: I ain't, you ain't, he ain't, etc.

Sorry, but it still sounds ignorant and careless. Even when grammar doesn't make sense, educated people use it, uneducated people don't.

[Dana King]

Don't be so sure about that BR; I ain't.

[B.R.Stateham]

Oh, Jesus in a Wet Suit. . . I thought I was finished with Lingusitics classes seventeen years ago!

[John McFetridge]

Peg, I think you may be confuing poor grammar with slang. People who use "ain't" are often not being careless or ignorant - they know it's not grammatically correct - they're using it as slang.

Slang has a lot of uses, but the main one is probably to let us know who's more "us" than "them." Look at the history of slang in African-American communities or Cockney rhyming slang.

[Jon Loomis]

As Lord Peter Wimsey used to say, it ain't necessarily so.

From Wikipedia:

Ain't is a colloquialism and a contraction originally used for "am not", but also used for "is not", "are not", "has not", or "have not" in the common vernacular. In some dialects it is also used as a contraction of "do not", "does not", and "did not" (i.e. I ain't know that). The word is a perennial issue in English usage. It is a word that is widely used by many people, but its use is commonly considered to be improper.[1]

[edit] Related words and usage

Ain't was preceded by an't, which had been common for about a century previously. An't appears first in print in the work of English Restoration playwrights: it is seen first in 1695, when William Congreve wrote I can hear you farther off, I an't deaf, suggesting that the form was in the beginning a contraction of "am not". But as early as 1696 Sir John Vanbrugh uses the form for "are not": These shoes an't ugly, but they don't fit me. At least in some dialects, an't is likely to have been pronounced like ain't, and thus the appearance of ain't is more a clarified spelling than a new verb form. The related word hain't is an archaic and non-standard contraction meaning has not or have not. It can be found in literature, particularly in Mark Twain's stories such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is reminiscent of hae (have) in Lowland Scots. Another old non-standard form is baint or bain't, apparently a contraction of "be not". This word is found in eye dialect forms written by a number of older writers, including J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas.[2]

None of those words are to be confused with the term haint, which is a slang term for a ghost, famously used in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

[edit] Linguistic prescription and ain't

Critics of the contraction ain't may say frequent use of it is a marker of basilectal — which is to say, "vulgate" or "common speech". The same applies for using i'n'it (normally written as innit) instead of "isn't it". There is little justification for this judgment on etymological or grammatical grounds, but it remains a widespread belief that the word is "not a word" or "incorrect".[3] However, a descriptive analysis of frequency statistics does make it perfectly justifiable to regard it as a colloquialism seldom found in formal writing, though its frequent usage in popular song lyrics is one argument for more general acceptance in writing.[citation needed]

During the nineteenth century, with the rise of prescriptivist usage writers, ain't fell under attack. The attack came on two fronts: usage writers did not know or pretended not to know what ain't was a contraction of, and its use was condemned as a vulgarism — a part of speech used by the lower classes.[4] Perhaps partly as a reaction to this trend, the number of situations in which ain't was used began to expand; some speakers began to use ain't in place of is not, have not, and has not. A popular term in East End of London, Charles Dickens used Ain't for Cockney slang in many of his works such as 1838 novel Oliver Twist..Fagin -"see what a pride they take in their profession, my dear. Ain't it beautiful?" [5]