Ardith Hinton:

AH> When  I  say  "ain't  nobody  here  but  us chickens" in
AH> response to a query from  somebody  who  needs  help  in
AH> deciding  whether  or  not  to abandon the XYZ echo as a
AH> lost cause, I'm making a bit  of  friendly  noise  in  a
AH> jocular  fashion  to let them know I'm still reading the
AH> echo even if I don't write very often.

I ain't got no objections.

AH> I think  Alexander  knows  I  wouldn't  recommend  using
AH> "ain't" or "wanna" on a grade twelve English exam... but
AH> he's read widely enough to be aware of their existence.

He probably is, but I found his usage  somehow  out-of-place
in  our  discussion.   It  jarred  my  ear.  Of course, that
feeling was entirely subjective, but I couldn't help it.

AH> I hear the above in many popular songs from the US.

So do I, for I  love  first-wave  R&B  and  listen  to  such
singers  as  Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis (author of "One night
of sin"), Lloyd Price, Little Richard,  Chuck  Willis,  Ruth
Brown,  Lavern Baker, Ella Johnson (with her brother Buddy's
orchestra), Etta James, Big Mama  Thornton  (whose  original
version of "Hound dog" makes Elvis's a weak parody) and many
others.  The Clovers sing:

  There ain't nothing in this world
  For a boy and a girld
  But love, love, love.

Even the white country and rockabilly  singer  Carl  Perkins
sings:

  Ain't nothing shaking but the leaves on the trees.

Here's my friend singing it for me:

https://soundcloud.com/anton-shepelev/nothing-shaking-cover
(oops, he has correcte it to "there is")

Another  interesting  trend  is inverted verb inflections in
person.  Whereas Fats Domino sings  (in  one  verse  out  of
three with the phrase) "I wants to walk you home", Roy Brown
sings "Love don't love nobody" and The El Dorados sing  "She
don't run around."

When the snobbish Pat Boone (an English major) was recording
a watered-down cover of Domino's "Ain't  that  a  shame"  he
tried  actually  to  sing  "Isn't  it a shame" but the sound
engineer dissuaded him.

AH> I also note with interest that  our  neighbours  to  the
AH> south  tend  to  shorten  the  spelling  of  words  like
AH> "cheque" and "neighbour",  in  an  apparent  attempt  to
AH> simplify the language.

Rather,  it is to make those words native to English instead
of keeping them immigrants.  See, for example,  paragraph  I
(The  Naturalization of Foreign Words) in the third tract by
the Society for Pure English:

  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12390/12390-h/12390-h.htm

AH> I have requested MODERN AMERICAN USAGE from  the  public
AH> library.  :-)

Make  sure it is the original edition, because even the most
zelaus descriptivists agree that later editors betrayed  the
dead  Fowler  and ruined his dictionary.  I bought in Moscow
and presented to a friend the following reprint of the first
edition:

           A Dictionary of Modern English Usage:
           the Classic First Edition
           ISBN: 9780199585892

It seems to preserve even the typesetting of the original.

But you can have some Fowler for free on Bartleby:

               https://www.bartleby.com/116/
               [King's English]

which,  to  me,  has  the advantage of being a coherent book
instead of a  set  of  disjoined  articles  in  alphabetical
order.   Some  topics  merely touched in MEU are expouned in
great deatail in "King's English".  The  chapter  on  "will"
and  "shall"  is  a  masterpiece  (which I understood upon a
fouth re-reading :-).  The usage of "shall" and  "will"  and
"should"  and "would" by Agatha Christie and Anthony Hope is
now much clearer to me.

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