Webster says “irregardless” is a word. See below. But even if they didn’t, do you really believe that we should never invent new words? Or we shouldn’t be allowed to use them until the government or Webster or somebody publishes them first? Maybe France is a better place for you.
There’s an episode of the Simpsons where goofy words like “cromulent” form the crux of much of the humor. This episode is also where we find out the city motto is: “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man”.
The curious thing is, I can’t think of a way to say what they’re trying to say properly. Enlarges?
One of my pet peeves is people who, for example, say the number 112 as “One Hundred and Twelve”. It’s “One Hundred Twelve”. No “and”, this isn’t an addition problem.
I was dumbfounded. They had never heard the word and wanted to know what it meant. Thinking
slowly, and staring at all of the blank looks in the room, I finally came to my senses and said,
“it’s kind of like ‘youse guys’”.
hi y’all! where i come from, (not where i live) southern new england (roughly, boston down), “youse guys” is spoken suchly: “yiz.” As in-- “you kids keep it down down there or i’m comin down to spank all of yiz.”
by the way, misused apostrophes make me want to kill.
I remember correcting my sixth grade teacher because of this. “And”, as far as I know, is used to say the decimal point. (12.50 = twelve and five tenths, or twelve and one half.) Yet my math teacher had no clue. Go figure!
I had never thought about this being “wrong” before. I looked it up in the dictionary database on the school’s server (American Heritage, I think), and found:
Huh. You learn something knew every day. But I still don’t think I’ll be “civil” in the future.
(this is also the first time I’ve seen a dictionary describe something as a “bugbear”)
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It is a word, but:
“This is one of the ‘double negatives’ that in some people’s minds does irreparable damage to the user’s reputation as a literate person. If you use the word regardless, your reputation for irreproachable literacy will be preserved.”
- The Little English Handbook, Eighth Edition
Granted, that’s a rather flippant entry, but its truth runs through this thread. As for new words, of course we should have new ones, but any new word, IMHO, should be used to help facilitate communication. Which is to say that new words should, and are, created as the need arises. Creating a new word that means exactly the same thing as an existing word, with absolutely no discernable nuance to tell it apart from its predecessor, serves no such purpose.
That being said, what was the bit about France? Do they make up a lot of words?
I am one of those annoying people who LOVES words. I enjoy using them, reading them, dissecting them, discussing them. When I see a word and I don’t understand what it means, I look it up in the dictionary. I enjoy doing that.
When someone asks me what a word means, and I try to explain it to the best of my ability, I then go to the dictionary to see if there is a better way that I should have explained it. I enjoy doing that, too.
Some people find this condescending, like I am trying to look like I am smarter than they are. This is really not true, I just really like words!
I like to use words that truly express what I mean. I like using unusual words, because often there is a word that is not commonly used that expresses what I am thinking better than the more generic words that cover a broader base.
I am telling you this because when I started working for my employer, I was 20 years old and I thought irregardless was a word. My mom used it, and she was not stupid. So, my boss put up with my using this word until one day when he was having a bad day and finally snapped at me, saying that “irregardless is not a word!” Of course, (remember, I was only 20 and still thought I knew everything) I said “It IS a word,” and I bet him 20 bucks. Now, I DO NOT BET unless I am 99.9% sure I am right. And he knows this. So, I went and got the dictionary, and lo and behold-
IRREGARDLESS IS NOT A WORD!
I paid him the twenty bucks, and have never used that pseudo-word again. Covered with shame, I was, and this incident probably did more to disabuse me of the notion that I knew everything than any other situation I have ever gone through.
So, in a way, irregardless helped me to be a better person.
Scotti
PS-When I was previewing this post, I saw the post from KK stating that irregardless IS a word, so I (surprise, surprise) checked my dictionary. And it is now a word, but it wasn’t way back when, at the time of the bet.
My dictionary states that irregardless means regardless. Okay, so now how is this right? Apparently Webster has caved into the common usage thing, and if a word is (incorrectly) used for an extended period of time, it comes to mean what people have been using it to mean.
And this is wrong, because irregardless is a double negative, and if it really was a word, it would mean the opposite of what people intend it to mean.
Us word-lovers should unite and protest.
You know, I work with words, and I love language, but I hate all this misplaced emphasis on “double negatives.” Language isn’t a math problem. Does anyone really think that when Mick Jagger sings, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” he means “I can get some satisfaction”? I didn’t think so.
Considering that Ebonics/AAVE was being studied by linguists decades before such concerns ever emerged, this statement displays a staggering amount of ignorance, and perhaps bigotry.
Or maybe not - I was dumbfounded when I discovered that “flammable” and “inflammable” mean the same thing.
RE: “irregardless”
I don’t have my own dictionary handy to check, but the Webster’s entry provided earlier clearly shows that it is considered a nonstandard variation of “regardless” and that “regardless” is the correct form to use. Webster’s lists hundreds of slang words that are also real but shouldn’t be used except in the most casual of circumstances. So, the fact that a word is in the dictionary doesn’t necessarily mean that it has been accepted as standard English.
I for one will never use the word “irregardless.” And I’m not the Grammar Secret Police either - but “irregardless” is not the correct form of the word; it is used by people who don’t know what the real word is.
I also would never correct someone for using it unless they asked, or unless I was editing their written communication in a professional capacity.
Yeah, this confused the heck out of me too. I looked it up, and it turned out it was the latins’ fault. Evidently both their words - flammare and inflammare, IIRC - mean the same thing also, and since so many of our words are derived from theirs…
Scotticher: You want to talk about dictionaries “caving in” to incorrect usage, go and look up the pronunciation of “karaoke” in a dictionary. That will make you scratch your head…
The wife is from Chicago, I hear it’s a Chicago thing…she INSISTS on ending sentences with prepositions, as in
“I’m going to the mall, do you want to go with…?”
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*Originally posted by pldennison *
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Well, I guess you have a good point here. Words are used to convey something, and as long as you get your meaning across, and people know what you MEAN by the words you are using, it is probably silly to quibble.
OTOH, I think Mick Jagger gets all the satisfaction he wants.
Scotti
The usage note from the American Heritage, Third Edition on ‘hopefully’ is quite interesting. The entry is fairly long, so I’m not going to post it all, but here is the link to it on dictionary.com. I can’t resist quoting one sentence though:
The note says much the same as what Philbuck quoted, but at greater length, i.e. the use of ‘hopefully’ to mean ‘it is to be hoped’ is gramatically justified, but traditionalists disdain its use because it has apparently become associated (in their minds) with grammatical ignorance. To which I say: it’s people like that who ruined the perfectly good use of ain’t.
It does seem a bit odd, but I think it perfectly captures the sillyness of the objections to ‘hopefully’.
The bracketed material in the Dun’s quote was added by the American Heritage, not I. Coincidentally, it contains another word that’s been complained about in this thread: workaholic. Apparently it is a real word, and it’s not even labeled with the dreaded Non-Standard:
The marginally educated folks who use “irregardless” are the same ones who use the word “flounder” to describe something that is not performing correctly, when the correct word should be “founder”. Sadly, that misusage has been so extensive and for such a long time that most dictionaries now show “flounder” as an acceptable alternate for “founder”, irregardless of correctness. (Sorry.)
KKBattousai wrote
When I took French in high school, I was told that the French dictionary is put together by the government and that they are very strict about the words that they put in. I recall that “la picque-nicque” (the picnic) was an example of a word that was in common usage but wasn’t in the dictionary because it didn’t make the grade of the snooty compilers.
missbunny wrote
I agree. Damn fine advice, could’ve come straight from Miss Manners, who commonly says “Yes, it’s rude to do X, but it’s ruder to tell someone that they’re being rude by doing X.”
This time on my local news. Again, it was during the weather, hot and humid but “irregardless” of the heat, blah blah blah. It’s wrong. Yes, it’s in the dictionary. Yes, spell check recognizes it. That doesn’t make it proper!
Anyway, missbunny, I agree with you. I won’t use the word but I’m not going to correct people who do. In fact, it doesn’t even bother me as much when my friend says it, or my mom does. However, my friends and family don’t have writers telling them what to say. These people should just know better.
Well, I agree that most of the time when some one uses a double negatives, other people can understand him (trying to avoid saying they). Anyway, if it becomes accepted, it might be harder to distinguish between a double negative used as a negative (e.g. I can’t get no satisfaction) and a double negative used to express the negation of the first negative (e.g. I can’t not speak properly). But then again, if everyone understands my point, then i guess they are distinguishable.