‘Ain’t’

 by whiteray

“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone . . .” 

“It ain’t me, babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me babe . . .” 

“That ain’t the way to have fun, son . . .” 

One of the most firm lessons we got at Lincoln Elementary School in the mid-1960s was that the word “ain’t” was, at best, a non-standard usage that nice people avoided. At worst, it was vulgar, and all my teachers from first grade through sixth made it clear that they’d rather eat a plate full of bugs than be caught saying “ain’t.” 

It was a word we didn’t use in our household, a word that would have brought a conversation to a pause, if not quite to a halt. “Ain’t” would not have been as shocking as, say, any of the seven words on George Carlin’s famous list of a few years later, but had my sister or I used it in normal conversation, we would have been reminded that its use wasn’t proper. The unstated subtext of that reminder, I think, would have been that “proper” meant the word was not used by the college-educated or college-bound, essentially white-collar folks. 

Yet, I heard the word all around me. Looking back, I can see that the use or non-use of the word in mid-1960s central Minnesota – and mid-1960s America, for that matter – was a class (and on a national level, a regional) signifier. Its users in school were generally those whose parents held the blue-collar, manual labor jobs that made it possible for us white-collar folks to make it through our days with more ease. Among many other things, they fixed our plumbing, they changed the oil in our cars, and they were the ones who put together our freezers and refrigerators on the assembly line out at Franklin Manufacturing on the west side of town. 

We were not rich, by any measure, but my dad was a teacher and an administrator. He did not earn his living with his hands, while many of those whose kids used “ain’t” did. And traveling along with the view of “ain’t” as a working-class signifier was another, nastier subtext that bothered me then and bothers me today: the idea that the more frequent use of the word among those working-class kids and their hard-working folks was an indicator of – to be perfectly blunt – their lesser social value. 

And that judgment was, of course, utter bullshit. 

It happens that “ain’t” was for years a perfectly acceptable word in standard English. The word’s history is neatly summarized at Wikipedia, which traces the development of “ain’t” as a contraction for “are not,” “am not,” “have not” and a few other common constructions. And then, Wikipedia notes: 

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, some writers began to propound the need to establish a “pure” or “correct” form of English. Contractions in general were disapproved of, but ain’t and its variants were seen as particularly “vulgar.” This push for “correctness” was driven mainly by the middle class, which led to an incongruous situation in which non-standard constructions continued to be used by both lower and upper classes, but not by the middle class. The reason for the strength of the proscription against ain’t is not entirely clear. 

The strong proscription against ain’t in standard English has led to many misconceptions, often expressed jocularly (or ironically), as “ain’t ain’t a word” or “ain’t ain’t in the dictionary.” Ain’t is listed in most dictionaries, including the Oxford Dictionary of English and Merriam-Webster. However, Oxford states “it does not form part of standard English and should never be used in formal or written contexts” and Merriam-Webster states it is “widely disapproved as non-standard and more common in the habitual speech of the less educated.” 

I get the sense that the abandonment of “ain’t” by the British middle class during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a middle-class pretension, one more way of drawing another very clear class boundary in a society that hardly needed any more such boundaries. And, it seems, it was a pretension that was cheerfully adopted in the United States as well. 

Thus discouraged, the word disappeared from the vocabularies of most writers, except to make a point, generally a point of class (or, perhaps just as frequently, region). It could be a tremendously handy word to have in one’s box of writing tools, providing a contraction for those various constructions that can be awkward. Still, having been trained not to use the word, I don’t. Ten years ago, when I was about a thousand posts into my fifteen years of music blogging elsewhere, I checked just for fun, and except for its use in titles and lyrics, I’d used the word five times. 

I didn’t count the number of times the word came up in lyrics and titles, but that happened frequently. And that’s not surprising. It didn’t take more than a few seconds to come up with the three bits of lyrics that opened this post, and more could have followed easily. It’s obvious that “ain’t” is a mainstay in lyrics and song titles (perhaps because so much of our popular music has working-class origins). 

So I went searching for “ain’t” among the more than 86,000 mp3s in the digital stacks and came up with a list of 918 songs. Some of those are from albums with “ain’t” in their titles, but most of those occurrences – at least 700, I’d guess – find the word in song titles. Those tunes range along the time line from “T’ain’t Nobody's Business If I Do,” recorded by Sara Martin and Fats Waller in December 1922 to “Good Lovin’ Ain’t Easy To Come By,” recorded by Ryan Shaw for his 2020 album, Imagining Marvin. 

Not quite in the middle of that time line, we find “Ain’t Nobody Home” by B.B. King. So we’ll close with a brilliant 1974 live performance of the tune from a concert in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The concert took place in conjunction with the October 30, 1974, championship boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the match that’s come to be known as “The Rumble in the Jungle.” King originally recorded the tune for his 1971 album In London, and a single release went to No. 46 on the pop chart and to No. 28 on the R&B chart.