Those of you who read this post as an email and don't go to the blog itself are missing out on some clever New Yorker (mostly) cartoons that I post more-or-less daily, and also some occasionally interesting quotations of the day.
Today's offering is from the ever-quotable Mark Twain:
"Faith is believing in what you know ain't so."
Which reminds me of another Twain quote I've always loved:
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger"
And now, back to the matter of language, and the first Twain quotation above. Those of us of a certain age remember that "ain't" ain't a word, but the language changes with time, and now it is listed in my dictionary. My question is: why is it spelled with an apostrophe? Does "ain't" equal "ai not?"
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