My wonderful proof readers have challenged my quirky use of the word “aint” in the text of my new short story. Because it is slang, and I only use it in dialogue, I made a choice to spell it without the apostrophe, aint. I thought it might make the text interesting. However, their eagle eyes all called attention to it. One rule of writing is that the spelling and word usage should never be a distraction so I opted to follow their advice and change it to the more accepted “ain’t” with the apostrophe.
When I did this, I used the FIND/REPLACE option in the editing of Microsoft Word. That should make it very easy, right?
Not really.
The stupid software turned maintenance into main’tenance, which is a word that appeared in the text more than the word “ain’t.” Therefore, by trying to take the easy road, I only made more work for myself.
Ugh. Stupid Microsoft.