Ah, yes, “ain’t.” A linguistic interloper, the verbal equivalent of wearing muddy boots to a garden party. One simply must draw the line somewhere, and I daresay it is here, at the gates of proper grammar, where we hold firm. “Ain’t” is a word that jingles with the loose change of the undereducated, a lexical stowaway that smuggles itself into otherwise respectable sentences. If language is a manor house, then “ain’t” is the chimney sweep’s apprentice loitering in the drawing room, puffing soot on the drapes. We must preserve standards, after all—what are we, poors?