Academic Bowdlerisation?

For some reason or another I decided to use Howard
Pospesel’s Logic
books
as the textbooks for my introductory logic class. They’re pretty simplistic,
and have too many cartoons (which I think is part of why they are obscenely
over-priced) but they look fairly easy to follow, and by some time into the
semester, like say week two, I’ll be grateful I didn’t try for too high powered
a textbook with the young kiddies. Then again, a freshman aced my intermediate
logic course last semester, so I shouldn’t always
underestimate Brown students.

So one of the poppy references in the book is to
Dylan’s song, Like a Rolling Stone,
suggesting that the penultimate line can be understood as a little argument.
Pospesel writes the line as

When you got
nothing, you got nothing to lose

Now one thing should be clearly wrong with this
line immediately — Dylan didn’t sing the final ‘g’ on any word until John
Wesley Harding, so it’s clearly nothin’ not nothing. (Try
saying that last sentence using inverted commas rather than italics as a
quotation device.) But even worse, there’s a word left out. The sung version,
at least on Highway 61 Revisited, which
has as good a claim as any to being the canonical version, is

When you ain’t got
nothing, you got nothing to lose

Now it’s understandable enough that someone writing
a textbook in academic English might not want to use a sentence from a language
that has slightly stricter rules about polarity agreement than academic English.
[See footnote] But if you’re going to be this fussy shouldn’t you not use the
example rather than misrepresent it? And what’s with the fussiness about
idiolects in a book where every second sentence is taken from a comic strip?

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking until I went and
looked up the lyrics to Like a
Rolling Stone at bobdylan.com, His
Bobness’s Official Site. And the line in question is quoted as

When you got
nothing, you got nothing to lose

So I suppose if Bob is self-censoring, then someone
else following suit is not too worthy of complaint.

[footnote] I might be exaggerating a bit here. One
explanation for the ain’t is that is Dylan’s
idiolect you can’t match a positive verb phrase got with
a negative noun phrase nothing, so
the ain’t must be added to
get the polarity of the NP and VP to match. But I’m guessing that Dylan speaks,
or spoke, an idiolect where this kind of transformation is permissible but not
mandatory, so it’s not strictly speaking true that
he speaks a stricter language than academic English.