SUBSTANDARD TO STANDARD IN THREE YEARS: AIN'T

by Barbara Lewis & Steven Gray

In 1979 and 1991, the Usage section of the Explanatory Notes at the beginning of Webster's Eighth and Ninth Collegiates presented readers with two examples of "substandard" usage: "learn" in the sense of "teach"; and "ain't" in the sense of "haven't." In 1994, however, Webster's Tenth Collegiate announced the rehabilitation of both. "Learn" in its pedagogical sense was upgraded from "substandard" to "nonstandard." "Ain't" in its bereft sense rocketed from substandard to standard.

Clearly an explanation was in order, and Webster's Tenth obliged: "Although widely disapproved as nonstandard and more common in the habitual speech of the less educated, 'ain't' in senses 1 ["is not, are not, am not"] and 2 ["has not, have not"] is flourishing in American English." The note then adduces 11 examples of "ain't" being used by such representatives of the national community's prestige group as Richard Nixon, Mike Royko, and Andy Rooney. Oddly, however, all 11 of these examples involve sense 1 of "ain't"--which Webster's has approved as standard English at least since 1979--rather than the newly anointed sense 2. You might have expected Webster's to cite Ronald Reagan's incessant use of the vaudeville catch phrase "You ain't seen nothin' yet" during his 1984 reelection campaign, or maybe Carlos Santana's lyric "I ain't got nobody that I can depend on." But as these two examples suggest, "ain't" sense 2 frequently occurs in double-negative constructions, which Webster's Collegiate Dictionaries (including the Tenth) ain't never had no qualms about calling substandard, despite flourishing use among the nonprestigious: "double negative (1827): a now substandard syntactic construction containing two negatives and having a negative meaning."

Without taking too ungenerous an attitude toward "ain't" sense 2's new respectability, we point out that three years before Merriam-Webster's institutional conversion--and throughout the decade before that--Webster's Collegiate didn't merely disapprove of "ain't" sense 2 as nonstandard; it made that usage the poster child for substandard English. In case you're wondering about the new front-of-the-book example of a substandard word in Webster's Tenth, here t is: "is...pres 3d sing of BE, dial pres 1st & 2nd sing of BE, substand pres pl of BE." In other words, according to Webster's Tenth:

STANDARD: I ain't talking to you.
STANDARD: We ain't talking to you.
STANDARD: We ain't seen you in weeks.
DIALECT: I is talking to you.
SUBSTANDARD: We is talking to you.