in defence of ain't

"Ain't ain't a word. It ain't in the dictionary."

I've heard this from a number of teachers and professors over the years. And as a teacher myself, I find that students, no matter the age or educational background, continue to use ain't in English sentences.

One problem I have with the statement above is the "not in the dictionary" part. There is no governing body to outline what words are to appear in a dictionary, or what meanings should appear with the words. Just like the internet, the dictionary is largely made up of what a few people know and print on a page, with vague references to old literature. Dictionaries are not the best reference source available. And which dictionary would we use, since there are so many of them?

Ain't appears so often in spoken and written English that I think it's time to officially welcome it into proper English usage. But how should we do this? After all, what is ain't?

When we create contractions, we usually eliminate one or more letters from two words and add an apostrophe somewhere in order to make the contraction. For example: would not becomes wouldn't. Was not becomes wasn't. So what do we do to create ain't?

How about am not? Think about it this way: when using ain't, people are usually replacing am not with ain't in the sentence. I am not going to school becomes I ain't going to school. But then that problem of dropping letters and replacing them comes in.

But there's a solution. Will not becomes won't. There's no O in will. If we can do it for will not, why not do it for ain't?

It's time to make ain't a word we can use in proper English.