As usual, I am catching up belatedly with new episodes. But the discussion of "ain't" brought to my mind Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities where Lawrence Kramer, a Bronx DA, is very conscious of it and he uses on purpose "ain't" when talking with cops and "isn't" when talking with e.g. upper-crust Upper West Side suspects or witnesses.
Same here, tatiana.larina. When I write an article for one trade magazine client, I often use contractions to make the tone more casual. But my editor would not allow the use of ain't and would certainly red-line it (unless it's part of a direct quote). Still, in informal writing, I use ain't without worries. But even then, a red flag goes up in my brain due to years of teachers telling me it ain't a valid word. One English teacher even had a small poster on her bulletin board that said simply: Ain't ain't a word.
By the way, I tried to use Ngrams to trace the usage of ain't, but for some reason it replaces that with "is not." Not sure if there's a way around that, but if anyone knows how to avoid that kind of filtering by Ngrams, please enlighten.
Heimhenge said
Not sure if there's a way around that, but if anyone knows how to avoid that kind of filtering by Ngrams, please enlighten.
Ngrams offers the raw data via a link at the bottom of the page that I have reproduced here. Perhaps you can find get past their "simple" Ngram filtering by looking at the underlying data.
Ngram is inconsistent with what it's doing- it will modify ain't, aint, don't , but it will leave alone dont.
Once, I put an error message in the computer that said something like 'It ain't so' and the users, all young, protested and made me put in a proper message. It was maybe 1990.
Old fashioned today ? Maybe not. Don't rap artists limit themselves to only aint and dont ?