“Dear Mr. Derbyshire—I suspect you have been over this point many times
already so I am sorry to bring it up to you again. In your most recent
essay, ‘Here to Stay’, in which, yet again, you express my own thoughts
better than I can, you write, ‘Aren’t I ashamed of myself?’ a verbal ‘macro’
which expands
into the preposterous ‘Are I not ashamed of myself?’ I think you should
have written, ‘Ain’t I ashamed of myself?’ the verbal macro which expands
into the sensible ‘Am I not ashamed of myself?’”
I thought aren’t I? sufficiently well established by now. Neither Fowler
nor Follett seem to have anything to say about it, and I took a quick trawl
through Jespersen, but his indexing is so crappy you really have to spend
time reading through whole articles, which I can’t be bothered to do.
Mencken, however, says this:
“A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage
from what is still regarded as barbarous. No American of any pretensions, I
assume, would defend ain’t as a substitute for isn’t, say in ‘He ain’t
the man,’ and yet ain’t is already tolerably respectable in the first
person, where English countenances the even more clumsy aren’t. *Aren’t*
has never got a foorhold in the American first person singular; when it is
used at all, which is rarely, it is as a conscious Briticism. Facing the
alternative of employing the unwieldy ‘*Am* I not in this?’ the American
turns boldly to ’Ain’t I in this?’ It still grates a bit, perhaps, but
aren’t grates even more. Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling
the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the past
can have much doubt that it will succeed again, sooner or later.”
That was written between 1919 and 1936, though, and my impression is that
*aren’t* has got wider currency in the USA since then. I wouldn’t rule out
the possibility that I am guilty of a Briticism, though. You can take the
boy out of the Bronx, but you can’t take the Bronx out of the boy.
The Columbia guide comes down hard on
*ain’t* but offers no verdict on aren’t. Ain’t sounds quaint to my
ear — puts me in mind of Huckleberry Finn; the logical amn’t I have never
heard; I seem to recall seeing it in old literature, but a scan on the works
of Shakespeare turns up no occurrences. I think this is one of those
“knots” or “singularities” that occur in every language, where nobody quite
know how to say it.