Aint aint a word and you aint supposed to say it.

My family on my Dad's side, the Mangum clan, hails primarily from New Mexico, West Texas, and Oklahoma. Has anybody seen "King of the Hill"? These are my relatives. My Grandfather, referred to one and all as "Papa", owned a large cattle ranch near Bloomfield, New Mexico, and in addition to the usual "y'all"s and "aint"s, had a stock of cowboy colloquialisms like his beloved interjection "dadgummit!". New Mexicans sound roughly similar to rural Utahns, but in Texas you will hear a more pronounced twang and drawl which makes one say "Ah thank" instead of "I think", and "caint" instead of "can't". To me, this is nothing more than accent, the flavor of the speech, like spicy instead of mild sauce (and you will find little of the latter in Texas), implying nothing about the speaker but local origin. Yet whenever someone wants to caricature someone without intelligence, manners, or education, they inevitably adopt a bit of the twang or drawl.

Our arbiters of culture tend to congregate in the populous Northeast, especially the New York, the nation's publishing capitol. I have observed that the prejudice against all Southern flavors of speech is strong amongst those that create our media, from Hollywood to New York and Washington, D.C.

My Dad, unlike his Dad, could not make a living as a cattle rancher, and as a consequence I spent my childhood in such exotic places as California and Canada (where my Mom is from). Also, there can be little doubt that I am more widely cultured and educated than any Mangum of preceding generation, so I don't speak as they do (even now I resist writing "talk like").

Sometimes it's not just the culture that we are part of which influences our language, but the culture we want (or don't want) to be a part of.