Ain't

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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 (rare) dialects it is also used as a contraction of "do not", "does not", and "did not" (e.g. 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]

Related words and usage

Ain't is not a word 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.

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]

Ain't would solve one logical problem of English grammar; it would serve as a useful contracted inverted form in the question "Ain't I?" Many prescriptivists prefer "Aren't I?" in this situation; (the Hiberno-English and Scottish English form Amn't I? follows other patterns), and for speakers of non-rhotic accents this may only be a baroque spelling of one possible pronunciation of the eighteenth century an't. Ain't is also obligatory in some fixed phrases, such as "you ain't seen nothing yet". Under grammatical analysis of some dialects of nonstandard English, such as African-American vernacular English (AAVE), use of ain't is in fact required in some conditions. In AAVE, ain't is used as a substitute for hasn't in certain past tenses. Thus, one would say "she ain't called me" for "she hasn't called me".

Ain't is also found to be a stereotyped word for most peoples from the southeastern and rural parts of the United States, and is commonly used in most casual conversational settings (see also Y'all). Modern usage notes in dictionaries note that ain't is used in a self-conscious way by some speakers and writers for a deliberate effect: what Oxford American Dictionary describes as "tongue-in-cheek" or "reverse snobbery", and what Merriam-Webster Collegiate calls "emphatic effect" or "a consistently informal style". An example of this effect would be "Ain't ain't a word so I ain't gonna say it".

Notable examples

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• The speech Ain't I a Woman? given by abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
• English author Lewis Carroll may or may not have been tweaking purists in his children's book Through the Looking Glass, when the character Tweedledee says to Alice, "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
• "Say it ain't so, Joe!", reportedly said by a young baseball fan to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the fan learned about the Black Sox scandal involving throwing the 1919 World Series. Repeated by U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in the 2008 vice presidential debate.^[6]
• "That ain't right!" used during stump speeches in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election by Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama to decry the policies of George W. Bush. Actor Chris Rock also repeated this line many times in the movie Head of State in which he was a candidate for presidency of the United States.
• "It Ain't Necessarily So" appears in Porgy and Bess; the libretto is by Ira Gershwin.
• "You ain't heard nothing yet!" spoken by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences.
• In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, upon receiving his medal, the Cowardly Lion exclaims, "Look what it says: 'Courage'. Ain't it the truth, ain't it the truth!"
• "The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings" generally attributed to San Antonio News-Express sportswriter Dan Cook.
• "Ain't" is commonly used in popular music such as in the songs, "Ain't She Sweet" by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen, "I Ain't Mad At Cha" by 2Pac, "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino, "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" by AC/DC, "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" by The Temptations, "Ain't Talking Bout Love" by Van Halen, "Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing" by Marvin Gaye, "Ain't It Fun" by The Dead Boys, "Love Ain't No Stranger" by Whitesnake, "Ain't Gone 'N' Give Up On Love" by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, "This Ain't a Love Song" by Bon Jovi, "Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers, and "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" by The Hollies.

References

1. ^ Ryan Dilley, "Why poor grammar ain't so bad" BBC, September 10, 2001, accessed May 13, 2009.
2. ^ J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, ch. 53.
3. ^ "Ain't", entry in Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, E. Ward Gilman, ed., (Merriam-Webster 1989) ISBN 0-87779-132-5
4. ^ Ibid
5. ^ Charles Dickens. "XLIII". Oliver Twist. Nalanda Digital Library. http://www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resources/english/etext-project/charles_dickens/olivr10/chapter43.html. "Project Gutenberg" 
6. ^ Transcript Vice-Presidential Debate, New York Times, October 3, 2008