July 1, 2008
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Why can’t “aint” be a word?
So I always wondered like since I was in early grade school… what’s so horribly wrong with the four letter sequence of a, i, n, and t that it gets so attacked so frequently? I mean that poor language token must be the loneliest sequence of letters in the world. It’s been around forever. It’s totally unambiguous what it means. It’s not inherently offensive in any way. And yet… for some reason people ridicule it. They make it an outcast. They refuse to let it join the dictionary and play with the other letter sequences! It’s the perpetual outsider. Poor, poor aint. Why hath they forsaken thee?
I think… it’s because people *love* to say the phrase “aint aint a word!” but that’s a pretty selfish reason to keep “aint” down don’t you think?
Comments (6)
Aint that the truth!
Ain’t it, though?
… possibly because it’s the sort of word that is used by common Cockney folk (in the UK, obviously.)
True,I’m a grammar fanatic…I can’t bear making a fool of myself by saying something like “lol” or ain’t in public…Through it they WERE in the dictonary
WE SHOULD START A REVOLT!!! ^0^
Let “Ain’t” In the dictonary!!!
Ain’t used to be a word! Grammarians had no right to remove it. I totally agree and have thought along the same lines for quite some time.
EDIT: P.S. I love your tags. Language rant! Haha!
Another one that used to get me in trouble was the word “alot”. Its supposed to be “a lot” meaning a quantity of something.
Then we have proper ways of speaking that if you used them you would sound pretentious and silly. If I called you and said, “May I speak to Nephyo?” Your correct response would be “This is he”. Now to me, that sounds stupid. But its correct.
We have a long list of commonly misspelled words that have been abused for so long, people just begin to accept them as other forms of spelling something. I get frustrated with the -ance and -ence endings because they are pronounced the same way and unless you’ve memorized which form to use, you won’t be able to figure it out by sounding out the word.