A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. No self-respecting American, I daresay, would defend /ain't/ as a substitute [Pg146] for /isn't/, say in "he /ain't/ the man," and yet /ain't/ is already tolerably respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even more clumsy /aren't/. /Aren't/ has never got a foothold in the American first person; when it is used at all, which is very rarely, it is always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy "am I not in this?" the American turns boldly to "/ain't/ I in this?" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but /aren't/ grates even more. Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling the exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the past can have much doubt that it will succeed again, soon or late. In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction between adverb and adjective, so that "I feel /bad/" begins to take on the dignity of a national idiom, and /sure/, /to go big/ and /run slow/[35] become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the United States into the war, the Marine Corps chose "treat 'em /rough/" as its motto, no one thought to raise a grammatical objection, and the clipped adverb was printed upon hundreds of thousands of posters and displayed in every town in the country, always with the imprimatur of the national government. So, again, American, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the distinction between nearly related adjectives, /e. g./, /healthful/ and /healthy/, /tasteful/ and /tasty/. And to challenge the somewhat absurd text-book prohibition of terminal prepositions, so that "where are we /at/?" loses its old raciness. And to dally with the double negative, as in "I have no doubt /but/ that."[36]