I know it's rather out of vogue, but I tend to take a rather prescriptivist
approach to the English language; I'm of the opinion that a non-trivial portion
of the meaning conveyed in speech (be it oral or written) is a matter of nuance
and subtext, and that these are lost if there's nothing resembling a consensus
as to what words mean and, indeed, how the language itself works.

Prescriptivism aside, though, I'm fascinated with a number of obscure little
quirks of the English language, oddball edge cases of a sort that bend or break
entirely the rather flexible and relaxed rules of the tongue.

One example is the missing negated present-tense form of "be", something
linguists apparently refer to as the "amn't gap".

I mean, I suppose it's not really missing, per se; amn't is a word, after all.
It's just fantastically archaic and long out of favor. The somewhat "official"
explanation is that, in essence, it's difficult to say, that the m-n sound
combination is unwieldy and unpopular. I don't think it's really that unwieldy,
to be honest; I just think it's fantastically difficult to enunciate clearly,
without it being mis-heard as, e.g., haven't.

English speakers of yore tried to overcome that unwieldy m-n combination,
primarily by dropping one of the two letters entirely, typically the m. If you
think amn't is awkward, behold the wonder that is a'n't. Yup. That's really a
thing that people thought was a good idea, once.

Now, a'n't isn't exactly the clearest-sounding word, spoken, and it's a bit of
an eyesore, when writ; it's one of a comparatively small number of double
contractions that have ever been anything like widely used, and for good
reason.

Importantly, though, a'n't and its eventual contraction into the equally
obscure an't are, well... bad, in one fundamental respect: they're ambiguous.
Well, I suppose that's not quite the right term, exactly; the intended meaning
ought always be clear from context. But there's a minor issue, in that people,
more or less simultaneously, tried to create the same word as a contraction of
"are not". Isn't English fun?

Anyway, the point of this phlog is that a'n't, in both of its uses (am/are
not), devolved (if you're uncharitable...) into the oft-maligned ain't, through
the lengthening of the vowel sound. (Ain't has been "created" a few times in
history, from different parents. In addition to its lineage from a'n't, it also
occurred elsewhere from ha'n't, a similarly unwieldy, and ambiguous,
contraction of "have not" and "has not"... and, one supposed, "had not", as
well.)

Tragically, ain't quickly became used in lieu of "is not", for no particularly
good reason. And this is where I feel my prescriptivist tendencies kicking in,
alas. Ain't is a word; no argument from me there. That it carries a stigma
about its use is unfortunate. I don't think most people really care, to be
quite honest, and anyone who insists it's "not a word" is simply mistaken. But
I sort of feel as though a better way to remove the stigma of its mere use is,
rather than just, say, telling people not to attach a stigma to it, is to get
people to use the fucking thing, well, correctly, and consistently.

There's a perfectly good word for "isn't". It's... isn't. There's a reason
linguists don't speak of the "isn't gap". When you *mean* "is not", use isn't.
When you mean "am not", or "are not", use ain't. 'tisn't hard. :)