What happened to the "g"?

I know we all noticed it during the McCain-Palin run, this dropping of the "g"s in speech. Palin was the master of the folksy "workin" folks, "hearin" you all, "lovin" her kids, etc. We even made fun of it. Saturday night live certainly did. And I do live in central Florida, kind of a southern place, home of Nascar and beach driving. In our neck of the woods there is a lot of "g" droppin in the speech of ordinary local folks. This is mixed in, of course, with the french of the Quebecois that winter here and the New York accents of those that retire here (and there are a lot of those). But a strange thing has been happening. Regular people, who don't do a lot of "g" dropping, have started doing it in their regular speech. I even caught myself doing it, It was scary. I heard myself and thought "why am I speaking this way"? I had no really good answer. But boy I am trying really hard not to do it any more. I am reminded that all my son's life, as log as he could talk, I have said "don't say ain't". This past week the chidren informed me that "ain't" is now in the dictionary. I think I don't care, they still shouldn't say it. Their description is that its in the dictionary but doesn't really mean anything which I thought was kind of cute. At any rate the reflexive use of the word ain't is similar to the dropping of "g"s when there is no call to drop the letter. And even if it comes naturally to you culturally, there is no point in not tryin to get it right!