Damon Young lost composure and commonsense, if not his linguistic flair, in writing "A Letter to That Man Who Emailed Me to Correct My Grammar" for The Washington Post. As a fan of the ain't, I have no problem with Young using the word, but I cannot understand why he walked into the trap of engaging in a foolish intellectual assault on the person who wrote him about stumbling over two misuses of standard English: it ain't for it isn't and these for those. Maybe the writer's closing order made Young's blood boil: "You do good work; don't try to sound like you are still in the street."
I will not defend the writer's arrogant intolerance of Young's usage, but seeing a Washington Post columnist open an essay with "I'm better at this than you are at everything you do" seems so radically puerile. How does he know who his critic is? Maybe she's a Nobel Prize-laureate in physics. Perhaps he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Or a MacArthur genius lawyer who fights for equal access to the law. Or a great chef, or clothing designer, or government employee or minister or police officer or mother. Reread Young's opening sentence. What was he thinking when he wrote everything?
In his article, Young reasonably explains that "rules of grammar are mostly suggestions." But notice how closely he adheres to standard English rules, beginning with the article title. He uses who instead of the more common nonstandard that. He uses man, although I doubt he asked the writer their sex (we can't tell by names only these days) or sexual identification (you know what I mean), which would be more in line with fashionable usage. Incidentally, I have been referring to Young as he/him/his because he does so on his website.
Young then refers to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison as ghosts, simply because they are deceased. I will not doubt that Young has the potential to reach Baldwin's and Morrison's legendary accomplishments and artistic mastery, but he has a long way to go. And if he does attain that pinnacle of literary achievement, it will be in large part because he learned a lot from those writers. I won't criticize Young's favorites, Raven Leilani, Cole Arthur Riley, Doreen St. Félix, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; therefore, Young should not dismiss Baldwin and Morrison as irrelevant. He likely wishes he could be such a ghost.
I prefer ain't for practical, not aesthetic, purposes. English has "standard" contractions of all types (e.g., are not = aren't, is not = isn't, was not = wasn't, were not = weren't), except for am not. The pure contraction amn't has been out of favor for centuries, so why not use ain't? As for them white boys instead of those white boys, Young is relying on a vernacular. Man people from my neck of the streets, the Bronx, has more than once said something like "I know them guys." Young should have the liberty to write as he pleases.
Young errs gravely in other parts of the article. He writes "sentences are music." Wrong. A sentence is a collections of words to transfer meaning; music is a combination of sounds to make harmony. Writers can only try to make their words seem musical. But they are not. He also says of his own writing, "I'm not even that good." Even though he says so merely to further belittle the person who wrote him, he actually is that good. Good enough to have a Washington Post column. Good enough to usually write with authority and credibility. Good enough not to lower himself by attacking his readers so acerbically and brazenly. In addition, he writes that as a 10-year-old, he needed to see ice hockey Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux handle a puck on the ice for only 15 seconds to know he was great, "Because talent always speaks the same language" even though he claims, "I don't know jack about hockey." Wrong and wrong. It takes a deep understanding of a team sport to understand why some athletes rise above their peers. For Michael Phelps and Allyson Felix, we maybe can count their medals to determine their greatness; for Ernie Banks, Charles Barkley, and Tony Gonzalez, we need to look deeper, and not just at their statistics, not with the experience of a 10-year-old. And talent surely does not speak the same language, not even metaphorically. Most middle schoolers know that such a claim is false. How can we compare the talent of landing a disabled passenger plane on the Hudson River or of saving a family from a building inferno while wearing 45 pounds of equipment restricting one's movement to fashioning an exquisite sentence? from Finally, Young fragilely considers correction of his usage "anti-Blackness." As a writing teacher, I have heard countless Black people tell me that their mothers corrected them for using ain't. And White folks use ain't as much as Blacks do.
Dare I advise Damon Young after reading his tirade? Here it is, something I tell all my students: It's all right to draft when you're emotional, but allow a cooling-off period before pressing send. Just write, Damon Young, and appreciate your readers—or you shall lose them.
