[QUOTE=Lightray]
The problem with irregardless/regardless isn’t that they’re synonyms – it’s that people can never remember that they’re synonyms.
[/QUOTE]
No doubt true for “inflammable”/“flammable”, but I would be shocked to see even a single example of someone sincerely employing “irregardless” to mean the opposite of “regardless” (e.g., “Though the project was otherwise a smashing success, irregardless to the excessive final cost, it would have to be described as a mixed victory at best”), entirely unaware that this is at odds with the majority of other occurrences of the word.
[QUOTE=Hostile Dialect]
I experience a sort of guilty catharsis from imagining myself using the people who say “irregardless” as fuel for a beach bonfire.
[/QUOTE]
Wow, that is hostile! 
I hope that she doesn’t start pressurising you so much that you feel you just have to jump in your car and go careening around the town.
Putting aside “pressurising”, if your implication is that there is something wrong with that use of “careening”, I’m not sure exactly what the objection would be. At any rate, the American Heritage Dictionary gives the usage note
[QUOTE=AHD]
The implication of rapidity that most often accompanies the use of ‘careen’ as a verb of motion may have arisen naturally through the extension of the nautical sense of the verb to apply to the motion of automobiles, which generally ‘careen’, that is, lurch or tip over, only when driven at high speed. There is thus no reason to conclude that this use of the verb is the result of a confusion of ‘careen’ with ‘career’, “to rush.” Whatever the origin of this use, however, it is by now so well established that it would be pedantic to object to it.
[/QUOTE]