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J. B. Stanhope replied to the topic Hello from Israel! in the forum Introduce Yourself 6 years ago
We learned the contractions in school, and usually they make sense anyway (except of ”ain’t”. I still have no idea what does it mean), so they weren’t too hard to learn.“Ain’t” is only used by more uneducated people. For example, they might say, “That ain’t true,” while the correct way is, “That isn’t true.”I must say, yes, ain’t means isn’t, but it definitely doesn’t mean you’re uneducated.At one point, I remember being interested to learn that ain’t stood for am not. I thought it may have become stigmatized because people used it in situations where they didn’t mean “am not”,
Just looking it up now, though, it looks like the history might be a little more complicated. Merriam-Webster dictionary says it originally came from a contraction of are not, but the Wikipedia article on the word says it may have come from a combination of the historical contractions of “am not” (am’nt or an’t), “are not” (an’t), and “have not” (han’t).
Merriam-Webster says that “ain’t” can mean “am not,” “is not,” “are not,” or “has not,” or “have not.”
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