That Ain't Right!

My third grade teacher, an interesting character whom, at times, I've called a bitch of enormous proportions, had, as one of her many innovative activities, an "ain't graveyard." As Jeff Foxworthy would say, "If I'm lyin'; I'm dyin'. Well, I'm still alive here; so all I can say is that Miss J., who eventually became Mrs. M., made a wall display that had a green construction paper background. On it, she placed white tombstones. You, and please keep in mind that the you here is a third-grader, received a tombstone whenever someone heard you say "ain't." In typical government school fashion, the ain't hearers were encouraged to snitch on you when they heard you say "ain't." Oh, and you had to write 100 times, "I must not say ain't." I guess it was okay to write it, however. One hundred times, anyway. That is, after all, the punishment we received. Well, other than that whole tombstone thing. Although there were a couple of people who were quiet enough never to be caught, I was eventually not one of them. Someone caught me saying the forbidden word and my name was entered on a tombstone for the "ain't graveyard." The hideous idea of this thing seemed to be that ain't was somehow to be killed or to die. Or I suppose those who say this word were destined to die. Nonetheless, the message that all of us got out of this was that a good education would teach us not to say something that went from Shakespearean times to colonial America to the present-day South and . . . , oh, wait a minute. I think I got it: The South is what they were trying to kill. And we all knew that we were hicks merely because we were from the South.

This exercise lasted for days before Miss J. figured out that she couldn't quite get everybody. Or maybe it even lasted until the end of the year. She certainly did try to kill the Southern in us, making snitches out of our Southern friends. Yes, this kind of educational-college-inspired crap was supposed to be part of our learning experience in third grade. I suppose there's some value in seeing your name on a tombstone, although I still can't imagine what, exactly, is that value.

After receiving my undergraduate degree in Speech Communication at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, I worked at a place that was, well, less death-oriented than the supposedly wonderful government school that I attended for third grade. At Alcatel in North Raleigh, a wonderful editor, Lyndal Warren, helped me to appreciate the value of the English language. One fine day when I was waiting for Lyndal to hand me some more work, I started reading the dictionary that was on my desk. (This event occurred, of course, before the Internet.) I remember fondly reading dictionaries when I was a child and I have always been intrigued by these word tomes. While reading, I came across an interesting usage note. It stated that the word "ain't" is a proper contraction for "am not." People who would never think of using this supposedly hick-sounding Southern word, however, would say "Aren't I?" in a minute. Sure enough, I wonder how many "Aren't I?s" I've heard from college graduates, even those from Ivy League-esque schools. Performing a bit of simple syntax manipulation, one sees that the subject-verb inversion of this question is "I are not." Okay, how many people know that this is wrong? And yet how many people have you heard say "Aren't I?" Perhaps there should be an "Aren't I?" graveyard as well in Mrs. M.'s class, but there will never be. Far too many Yankees make the error and, by golly, as we learned in government school that year: if a Yankee does it, that makes it not an error.