Is “Ain’t” Old-Fashioned?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi.

This is Nat, and I’m in Duluth, Minnesota, and I’m looking out at the sparkling Lake Superior.

Beautiful here today.

Oh, very nice.

Thanks for calling.

What can we do for you?

Nat in Duluth, welcome.

It occurred to me, just out of the blue a couple weeks ago, that I said the word ain’t when I was growing up.

And I said it among us children, and we said it commonly.

It wasn’t, we just said all the time, and then the teachers would beat it out of us.

And our parents, we would not use it at the supper table.

But I work with a lot of children, and I’m around a lot of children, including my own three who are in their 30s.

They were born in the 70s.

I’ve never heard them or young children say the word ain’t.

Nat, are you a teacher?

No, I work with children now.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

And you never hear the word ain’t.

I do not.

So what happened?

Did those teachers succeed?

Or did nature take its course?

Well, that’s a really good question.

So is ain’t out of fashion?

Is that what you’re asking more or less?

I guess so.

But how did it do that so absolutely?

You know, I asked this question recently in social media,

And I had a really great response from Jeff Nunberg, who does the commentaries on language for the public radio show Fresh Air.

And he had the same idea that I did when this first came up, which is ain’t is still used.

We know that it’s still used across America.

Sometimes it’s kind of canonized in idiomatic expressions.

Sometimes it shows up in lower registers of English and it’s used in African-American vernacular English.

But where it isn’t used now, where it used to be used a lot, is in fiction and movies.

I don’t know.

You use ain’t in your scripts and your dialogues in order to indicate that somebody was a rustic or a hillbilly or that they came from an uneducated background.

And I read a fair amount, and I see a fair amount of movies.

I don’t remember seeing this at all.

I mean, I haven’t analyzed this in a text form and looked at large bodies of data for this.

And actually, ain’t would be difficult to do.

But my impression in general is that ain’t is still widely used.

It’s just not used in the arts as much as it was.

And so maybe that’s part of the impression.

Maybe the kids aren’t picking it up from, you know, our gang, right?

Correct.

I don’t know.

That’s my thing.

But there’s a couple other things here.

I do think the teachers had a little bit of success in stigmatizing ain’t.

So that you knew that ain’t was a thing that you weren’t supposed to say around teachers and parents,

Even if you said it among your friends.

Oh, absolutely.

So that’s mainly what the teachers did.

I don’t think they got rid of it, but they certainly made it very clear that there were certain places that ain’t should not be used.

But another thing here is ain’t now is almost, I won’t call it ironic, but it’s attached to these phrases like say it ain’t so, or if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, or this ain’t your father’s Oldsmobile.

So ain’t is now kind of fossilized in these expressions that we have, and we use it to drop out of our normal register of speech and demonstrate that we’re talking more casually or colloquially or in a more friendly way.

Yeah, and I’m wondering if it particularly got stigmatized because it’s so much easier to say ain’t is a bad word rather than don’t use this particular grammatical instruction.

You know, it was a taboo word almost when we were kids.

This is the thing about ain’t. Criticizing ain’t has also fallen out of fashion.

And now we have other peeves.

Maybe it’s irregardless or hopefully at the beginning of a sentence.

And those two at some point will fall out of fashion.

And we will, as a society, adopt other peeves to get upset about.

They will.

Nat, thanks so much for calling.

Well, I appreciate it.

And have a wonderful day.

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