Nov 2, 2008
They ain’t the same: ain’t serves a purpose in standard and formal English that isn’t doesn’t.
[The use of] ain’t tells you that you’re dealing with a nitty-gritty verity that you don’t need a college education to understand.
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Only when used by people who don’t otherwise use it.
For some, it’s used as just a general replacement of “isn’t”. Then it’s not serving the purpose of punctuation, but is just a part of their dialect.
Similar to profanity, actually…
…which is why you said “in standard and formal English”.
So um. Yeah.
I don’t actually have anything to add. :)
Yes! Justification to use “ain’t”!!! And that is exactly what I use it for – when someone ain’t gettin’ what ought to be hitting them in the face!
That’s kind of like a lot of words in Ebonics, actually. Have you studied that at all?
I ain’t getting it…
I like that a lot.
“Similar to profanity, actually…”
well, there’s an entire conversation right there. but . . . yeah. :]
and this is just a personal thing, but for some reason i notice that i’ll imitate an urban dialect for more or less the effect you describe here, but never a rural one. hm.
I am sure that you already knew this, but “ain’t” was formal at a point in time and was banned from UK. Check it out!
I probably use “ain’t” a lot more than I realize. And for some reason, unbeknown to me, I say “hain’t.” I can’t even think of a context to illustrate, but I think it is usually in place of hasn’t it.
I’ve been working on not saying it, but sometimes it just flows out.
this reminds me of the time i told boris johnson that “ain’t” wasn’t a word. his response:
“You AIN’T gonna tell me AIN’T AIN’T a word ’cause you AIN’T my momma.”
he was right.