Wasn't haven't it, ain't haven't it

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Renditions of "wasn't having it" as "wasn't haven't it" are pretty common. Some examples from web search:

yeah, he tried but seen that I wasn't haven't it.
Rookie wasn't haven't it.
Richard wasn't haven't it today.
Ms. Claudia wasn't haven't it lol you started it & Claudia finished it.

And from twitter:

He was trynna touch up on the girls b4 practice someone told the coaches & they  wasn't haven't it AT ALL bruh.
Had to relax my hair by force!  The comb wasn't haven't it lol
I tried to tell you Mike Wallace wasn't haven't it!!
Great game from Linden tonight… RC tried to play bully ball but Linden wasn't haven't it#uctfinals

This is phonologically plausible because flapping and voicing of the final /t/ in haven't — much less "t/d deletion" — means that "haven't it" and "havin' it" are pretty much homophonous.

The question of why it's morphologically plausible I'll leave to others. But this is not the only non-standard place that forms of have turn up:

"Couldan't, shouldan't, wouldan't", 7/31/2004
"Wouldn't of have", 2/21/2009
"Ask Language Log: 'will have had gone'", 3/6/2012

And the second n't? Maybe a new extension of negative concord

Anyhow, the present tense version is also common:

And tryna take my money, well, just ain't haven't it.
I have this head canon that after they kill Ragyo and stuff Ryuko and Satsuki get closer to the point where Satsuki gets really protective and notices that a certain someone has a crush on her and being the protective older sister she is she ain’t haven’t it.
Today I gave him a Pep talk and told him we ain't haven't it today and as u can see he's gonna let me get some rest.
Tyra Banks has apparently fired Paulina Porizkova as a judge on America's Next Top Model, and the 80's supermodel ain't haven't it.



14 Comments

  1. Jerry Friedman said,

    April 18, 2015 @ 6:18 pm

    Spall chukker error?

    There's also another present tense:

    Hopper isn't haven't a great day so far.

    Waitrose isn't haven't the best luck at the moment..

    "Wasn't haven't any" gets 29,700 Google hits, which doesn't mean much, but "wasn't haven't no" gets 4, which might mean it's much less common.

  2. Jerry Friedman said,

    April 18, 2015 @ 6:27 pm

    In support of the cupertino theory, there are hits such as this from Twitter:

    Just wasn't haven it with them chopsticks

  3. Eric P Smith said,

    April 18, 2015 @ 6:29 pm

    My first (kneejerk) reaction: "I wasn't haven't it" is pretty stupid.

    My second thought: "I wasn't having it" is an odd expression in the first place. In what other context can "have it" mean "put up with it"?

    In that light, changing an odd expression into another odd expression perhaps isn't so odd.

  4. Rebecca said,

    April 18, 2015 @ 8:15 pm

    I think it's just that for these constructions where the pronunciation is reduced enough to be noticeable even to the speakers, people sometimes don't bother to note the unreduced version of what they are saying. They just try to spell it like it sounds, without worrying about morphological plausibility. Like the very common misspelling "could of".

    I say this in large part because of the sense I've been trying to make of the title spelling of one of my favorite songs, "Ain't Gone 'n' Give Up on Love", by Stevie Ray Vaughan. The title and first line would be more commonly spelled as "(I) ain't gonna give up on love". But Stevie actually pronounces it more like "(I) ain't goinn give up on love". Once you leave the land of conventional spelling, I think just about anything is fair game.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6NHphqXdH8

  5. Gregory Kusnick said,

    April 18, 2015 @ 8:26 pm

    Eric: On third thought, isn't "put up with" even odder? "I had a gift from my aunt" means I accepted it. Conversely, refusing it means not having it.

  6. John Walden said,

    April 19, 2015 @ 2:33 am

    Eric P Smith: Perhaps not that odd on second thoughts. I begin to see that "I wasn't having it", as well as "I'm not having it" and "I won't have it", as being something not unlike like "have" for causation: "I'm having my lawn cut tomorrow". It's also for usually less pleasant occurrences over which the person had less control: "I had my wallet stolen". Then there's "Have him flogged!" and "Have him do it again!".

    Not that this helps with "wasn't haven't it".

    I see 8 ghits for "was haven't it" but they don't seem to be the opposite of "wasn't haven't it". They seem more like that the n't was mislaid:

    "I heard that Brown tried to shake Ocean hand when he came out the studio but Ocean was haven't it"

  7. John Walden said,

    April 19, 2015 @ 2:34 am

    Fourth thoughts?

  8. Amy Whitson said,

    April 19, 2015 @ 9:04 am

    As an English instructor at a community college, I think it's probably fruitless to assume that misspellings reliably correspond to a belief that the words transcribed are the words spoken. Even in handwritten documents, I see the were/where and defiantly/definitely confusion. I think these students recognize that were and where (like having and haven't) are different words, but they kind of give up on English spelling having any sort of logic and write down anything that 1) looks like a word and 2) could be pronounced similarly to what they would say.

  9. Coby Lubliner said,

    April 19, 2015 @ 9:16 am

    In a printed edition of one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels (from the 1990s) I found, not once but consistently, "kind've" for the adverb-like modifier "kind of". Any thoughts about that?

  10. Eric P Smith said,

    April 19, 2015 @ 11:37 am

    @Coby Lubliner

    "kind've" for "kind of": possibly a hypercorrection following the correction of "could of" into "could've"?

  11. Coby Lubliner said,

    April 19, 2015 @ 2:02 pm

    Eric P Smith:

    Yes, that seems obvious, but whose hypercorrection? The very literate Michael Connelly, or a copy editor at a major publishing house (Little Brown)?

  12. BZ said,

    April 20, 2015 @ 12:14 pm

    It's something I can easily imagine myself writing just because of weird muscle memory / writing sounds instead of words thing. It's why people write things like "could of" despite knowing that it's "could've".

  13. Jonathon Owen said,

    April 20, 2015 @ 10:40 pm

    I'd guess it's just a minor cognitive error—your brain reaches for one word and pulls out a graphically or phonologically similar word. And if your brain has already been primed with one negative contraction, your fingers might get carried away and type another.

  14. Douglas Prats said,

    April 24, 2015 @ 10:41 am

    Easy mistake for someone if not being careful, since many do not really pronounce the T at the end of the "-n't" contraction in fast speech. This is especially confusing in the nearly indistinguishable CAN vs. CAN'T, the way many of us pronounce them in fast US English. Nobody would confuse CAN and CAN'T in writing due to their obviously opposite meanings, but this isn't as clear with HAVIN' vs. HAVEN'T, since "wasn't havin' it" has a very negative meaning: putting TWO NEGATIVE verbs in a row seems to reinforce the speaker's/writer's desire to express a really negative statement about the topic at hand.

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