In Praise of “Ain’t”

By Richard Goodman

Reading a column by Roy Blount, Jr.—such a delightful fellow—on regional speech inspired me to write a few laudatory words about “ain’t,” smugly labeled nonstandard in my dictionary. As a boy growing up in southeastern Virginia sixty years ago, I was taught in school that “ain’t” wasn’t proper. “You should say ‘isn’t’ instead,” my teachers insisted. Most—if not all of us—did say “ain’t,” though. It was as natural as rain. I think the teachers’ insistence that we not use “ain’t” was due in part to shame. The teachers in our southern schools didn’t want to perpetuate the idea, the perception, that Southerners were ignorant hillbillies with missing teeth, walking around barefoot, slow and dimwitted. They wanted us to go out into the world walking proud, well bred, and without stigma. We wouldn’t, though, if we used “ain’t.”

Well, those teachers were wrong. I’m still trying to find out what, actually, is wrong with “ain’t.” Nonstandard? That’s a tautology, isn’t it? (The one thing I learned in my freshman logic class.) It’s nonstandard because you say it’s nonstandard.

I believe “ain’t” has myriad virtues. It’s one of the most versatile and vibrant words in the English language. Every time I hear it spoken, it confirms that. That’s a lot more than I can say for bankrupt, foreclosure, cancer, murder and betrayal, not to mention taxes and, God forbid, politics. I’d like right here and now to lobby for its rehabilitation. I think “ain’t” ought to become standard English. It actually is, de facto, when you think about it.

One of the most famous lines in sports history would be dead and gone without it: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” That plaintive question was a boy’s plea to Shoeless Joe Jackson, asking Joe to reassure him that he, Joe, didn’t cheat, that he didn’t have anything to do with fixing the 1919 World Series. This question, that so strongly and clearly stands for all innocence and faith betrayed, would never have lasted, would never have taken its place in our hearts and souls without “ain’t.” “Say it isn’t so, Joe?” No, no, no.

When I think about using “ain’t” as a boy, I can still see and smell the earth and the people close to it. It’s a common person’s expression, and it knows no racial boundaries. Geographical, economical, maybe—but not racial. I used to use it without shame—what did those teachers know?—with all my friends, and they used it with me. For us, it wasn’t an affectation, it was how we talked. I wasn’t using it as a boy in Virginia to add “local color” to my speech. It was just part of me. Then I grew up, didn’t stay in Virginia, moved up North, and it quickly became apparent to me that “ain’t” was nonstandard. Or ungrammatical, to put it smack in the classroom. So, for God’s sake, I better not use it. Gradually, I stopped, except for rare occasions when it was clear that I knew it was nonstandard but was using it for effect. I missed it. I missed the connection it gave me to a culture, to a land, to a kind of speech I love, to a place. I missed the music of it, the pure pleasure of saying it in my everyday speech.

I’d like to begin the campaign for extricating it from nonstandard on a musical note. What would songwriters do without “ain’t?” Song lyrics demonstrate clearly the power of this word, the glory of it. Nobody complains about the use of “ain’t” in a song, do they? Think of just a few instances of what it’s added to the lyrics of songs:

Ain’t that a shame

My tears fell like rain

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Just a cryin’ all the time

Ain’t no mountain high enough

No valley low enough

It don’t mean a thing

If it ain’t got that swing

It ain’t me, Babe,

It ain’t me your lookin’ for

It ain’t necessarily so

And so on and on and on.

So why does “ain’t” sound so good, so right, in songs? It scans better in so many cases, true. I’ll give you that. It’s a practical matter for the songwriter. Look at its alternative, “is not” or “isn’t”. Neither has the panache or force “ain’t” does, and this is especially noticeable when you have to choose one over the other to begin a song. Yes, you can begin a song with “isn’t” and successfully, too: “Isn’t it a lovely day to be caught in the rain?” But you’d be hard pressed to begin a song with “is not.” “Ain’t” has economy and power and character. And one syllable. That’s a lot going for it when you’re a songwriter searching for the right word for your lyric.

So, are you telling me that all these great songwriters are illiterate? Ungrammatical? You’re not telling me that, are you?

But, I can hear you say, “Songwriting is a genre where a convention like ‘ain’t’ fits right in. Songwriting isn’t formal writing. ‘Ain’t’ has no place in formal writing.”

Why not?  I want to know is what is inherently wrong with using “ain’t”?

I can tell you what’s right with it. It’s strong, it’s musical—when was a one-syllable word so close to two?—it looks as good as it sounds. It’s economical. It’s working class, it does its job. The reasons against it are, in fact, purely those of class, in my opinion. It’s a beautiful word, a noble word. Let me bring in a big gun here, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to conclude. He wrote, about the power of street language, “Cut these words & they would bleed; they are vascular & alive.”

Isn’t that the truth.
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Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, The Soul of Creative Writing, A New York Memoir and The Bicycle Diaries: One New Yorker’s Journey Through 9-11. He is co-editor of The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing. He has written for The New York Times, North American Review, Harvard Review, Ascent, Hippocampus and River Teeth. He lives in Louisiana. His website is www.richardgoodman.org.