“Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/07/25/the-shadowlands-of-language

by helsinkiandrew • 6 years ago

46 74 6 years ago

economist.com

heinrich5991• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/0knTf

ukj2• 6 years ago

Language evolves. Use and meaning of words changes over time.

Logocentrists are surprised.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logocentrism

twelvechairs• 6 years ago

English evolves because it is polycentric. Other languages are held back by formal regulators from evolving (e.g. Association of Spanish Language Academies, Académie française, Council for German Orthography, China's State Language Work Committee, etc.)

082349872349872• 6 years ago

“irregardless: a word that distinguishes people who do not care much about English usage from those who care terribly—and want the world to know it.”

In other words, a sibboleth?

Exercise for hackers: what are the minimal code sequences one can write to distinguish between various x86 versions? various python versions? etc.

bena• 6 years ago

Shibboleth

webmaven• 6 years ago

SamReidHughes• 6 years ago

"Disregardless" still gets no respect.

jasode• 6 years ago

The actress Jamie Lee Curtis complained about MW's addition of "irregardless" because she misunderstands the purpose of that dictionary: to document and describe actual language usage. Therefore, if "irregardless" is in wide common usage, it gets added as an entry.

Dictionaries that are more descriptive than prescriptive: The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (e.g. "whatevs", "chillax", other slang, etc added to OED: https://www.google.com/search?q=newest+words+in+Oxford+Engli...)

A dictionary that is more prescriptive (more conservative and avoids adding new non-standard words): The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictiona...)

tldr: most people don't know the underlying rationale of dictionaries

some Youtube links...

deep link of Kory Stamper @ Merriam-Webster talking about adding nonstandard word "irregardless" to the dictionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLgn3geod9Q&feature=youtu.be...

Anne Curzan (advisor role on Usage Panel) for American Heritage Dictionary explaining "what makes a word 'real'?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6NU0DMjv0Y

[to downvoters: it would be helpful if you state what's incorrect in my post; I don't want to give out bad information. Thank you.]

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

I guess I'd just assume she had a prescriptive personality type and preferred the dictionary she happened to look at to have the same view of language.

ukj2• 6 years ago

Fun game to play with Linguistic prescriptivist (endearingly called Grammar Nazis) in 2020.

Host your own dictionary and insist that theirs is wrong.

Aengeuad• 6 years ago

Your post is pretty fair and I don't have an issue with it but I do have an argument (albeit not a very convincing one) for why somebody might take issue with a word like irregardless. I'm sure we've all experienced the frustration in an argument where somebody will point to a less comprehensive dictionary that doesn't document your particular or explicit usage of a term and use that to say you're wrong, but the opposite is occasionally true where people will take popular usage or a dictionary entry of a term that might be incorrect or used in a way that is incorrect and use that to justify their continued usage of the term. The former is frustrating because both parties may understand and come to terms with each other but one is shirking their responsibilities in an argument, the latter can be frustrating because there may be a genuine difficulty in communication until the common usage or dictionary is brought out to clear up the confusion.

There's a strong case to be made that the purpose of a dictionary is to aid communication by describing the usage of words so I think it's clear that 'irregardless' deserves a mention although with a warning on usage, which seems to be the case here with Merriam-Webster describing it as non-standard and the OED going a step further and saying it's not correct. Language prescriptivists usually deserve the lectures on the usefulness of descriptive dictionaries that they get but I don't think that it's always useful to go to the extreme and celebrate confusing or commonly understood as incorrect usage of words despite some minor usage. The article brings up a good word that was changed over confusion which was inflammable becoming flammable as the 'in' suffix could be taken to meaning a negator and I don't think anybody really had an issue with this, although it does say that 'flammable' is malformed but I really don't see how.

smitty1e• 6 years ago

Caring about grammar may indicate one stands with the wide soup rim assists.

daffy6• 6 years ago

The author seems to claim that `irregardless' is all right and that caring about it is caring too much and vain. He compares it to other malformed words such as `television' and `flammable'. But there seems to be a significant difference between these and that. While recognizing the malformedness of these words require knowledge of Greek and Latin, recognizing that of `irregardless' is trivial for anyone who is proficient in current English: it is obviously a stupid word, and that makes it stupider.

thechao2• 6 years ago

Pure conjecture on my part: irregardless is an intensifier of dismissal. It allows the word to start with a vowel. Since (American) English requires exhortations to start with a consonant, it forces the speaker to begin the sound with a glottal stop. Initial glottal stops are markers for interjective cursing, like “‘Asshole!”

kazinator4• 6 years ago

The conjecture is likely wrong. Some speakers simply reach for irregardless whenever they want to say "without regard" and are never heard using regardless.

throw0101a2• 6 years ago

and `flammable'.

Which has the same definition as inflammable.

This has always been inconceivable in my mind.

lou13062• 6 years ago

Similarly infuriating fact: in Italian, "infranto" means broken, but "infrangibile" means "unbreakable" (as in glass).

sjwright2• 6 years ago

Even though I know the correct meanings, no matter how hard I try the word “flammable” sounds to me like “able to flame” while “inflammable” sounds like “incapable of flame”.

I hate English.

dkxbdkf2• 6 years ago

Inflammable means able to be put “in flames”. But most people read “in-“ in this case as a negation, and therefore assume it’s the opposite.

So “flammable” is born and people start using it and thinking the original form is opposite.

But inflammable materials are dangerous to treat otherwise! Since no one confuses “flammable” for inert, for safety reasons, the word “flammable” is used when labeling inflammable material.

The Simpsons made a joke about it once with Dr. Nik.

jt2190• 6 years ago

it is obviously a stupid word, and that makes it stupider.

This is the social signaling aspect of language at work, not the communication part.

Human brains can trivially digest the correct meaning of “irregardless”. Using the word, however, marks someone as not having had a “proper” education, and would perhaps brand the speaker as “stupid”, “irregardless” of whether the idea they were expressing was intelligent or not.

balfirevic• 6 years ago

Human brains can trivially digest the correct meaning of “irregardless”.

It can also understand the meaning of "iregardles", "ireggardless" and "irregardlless". Is that really a sufficient condition for the word to be considered correct?

baddox2• 6 years ago

Except if you are actually well-educated then you would know that “irregardless” is widely used to mean the same thing as “regardless” and thus to use it as such would not be a sign of a lack of education.

daffy6• 6 years ago

This is the social signaling aspect of language at work

How so? Surely those who say `regardless', the vast majority, are not trying to signal anything.

WarOnPrivacy4• 6 years ago

it is obviously a stupid word, and that makes it stupider.

One might argue that 'stupid' was originally intended to describe a person of low intelligence and because words aren't sentient, it's a misuse of the word.

It seems like a stupid argument to make, though.

ColeyG• 6 years ago

Not commenting on the content of your comment but what the hell is your formatting?

daffy6• 6 years ago

What do you mean?

irthomasthomas• 6 years ago

My favorite/worst example of language evolution is the word factoid. Factoid literally meant a thing resembling a fact (i.e. a false fact) which is believed to be true after being repeated in print. Now, those same writers who where presumably spreading factoids, have inverted its meaning to be 'a minor, but true fact' [0].

[0] http://www.doctoryourself.com/hoffer_factoids.html

vbtemp• 6 years ago

Would a more correct version of a minor, true fact be a _factino_? Kind of like a Plutino or Neutrino?

daffy6• 6 years ago

Factule, perhaps, from the unattested but regular diminutive factulum.

jwilk• 6 years ago

factlet (like piglet)

Udik3• 6 years ago

Trivia?

minitoar• 6 years ago

Sort of an odd use of the “oid” suffix which means “like” or “resembling”. “Like a fact, but not”.

baddox2• 6 years ago

I always thought “meteoroid” was an odd term. It’s something like a meteor, except it hasn’t entered the atmosphere. It’s like calling a slice of bread a toastoid.

swiley2• 6 years ago

The popularity of the word “irregardless” demonstrates a property of human thought and socialization that’s very important to most people here: that the majority of people (at least those that speak English) are perfectly happy copying other people’s behavior without asking why. More complex examples of this come from studies where people struggle to communicate the difference between Boolean operators (specifically OR and XOR.)

My point is that this is a reminder of why we have software engineers and why cheap contractors, AI, and easier to use tooling (such as “graphical programming languages) haven’t been able to replace them: people think and speak too imprecisely to communicate even just software specifications correctly let alone implement them.

hguant• 6 years ago

I was a political philosophy major in college - it's interesting seeing how important being able to rigorously define what you're saying, and taking into account what your statements assume, is critically important for both engineering, and philosophy.

...also it turns out that dissecting a statement and pointing out the inconsistentsies is a great way to piss people off.

posterboy• 6 years ago

it's precisely the formal logic, albeit mostly in legal, that employs double negation to cover all bases, in case of doubt about the excluded middle, and importantly, to reverse liability of proof.

You are not not an idiot. I didn't say you were one, but I will leave the proof to the opposite to somebody else.

It might just be an intensifier, irregardless of the legalese, whenever it defaults to the law of excluded middle, that is, perhaps when the proof is not even considered relevant, whereas "regardless" implicitly connotes neglect.

Regardless ofyou being an idiot.

or Irregardless of you being perhaps an idiot.

Alas, double negation tends to be not very stable in informal speach, e.g. any "some", not any "none", not not any: "some", "any" or "all". This involves type coercion from the gradual to the binary interpretation (and it's terribly difficult to make explicit, exactly not trivially simple at least).

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

copying other people’s behavior without asking why

Yielding to a shared meaning is the entire point of language.

uniqueid• 6 years ago

Indeed. If we didn't slavishly imitate the language of people around us, we'd have no languages at all. Even as things are, it takes a decade and a half for most people to master their own tongue.

swiley2• 6 years ago

It’s not the shared meaning that I’m talking about but its thoughtless acceptance.

trynumber9• 6 years ago

If it makes you feel better it's not widely used:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=regardless%2Ci...

Emma_Goldman• 6 years ago

It's scarcely surprising that it's not used in print. Books are considered, written by those most proficient in English, read and re-read, and professionally proof-read.

The extent of its use in ordinary conversation is something else entirely.

Jedd4• 6 years ago

I recall my mum, it must have been in the 1980's, engaging in much eye-rolling and tut-tutting at our (Australia) then prime minister, Bob Hawke, using the word 'irregardless'. Bob was ostensibly quite charismatic, but no one could accuse him of being an especially thoughtful communicator.

In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt a word that sounds sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire , and assume it's sufficiently cromulent for formal use. (A very recent thread on HN was around the use of the word 'decimate' as an alternative spelling for 'destroy', for similar reasons.)

I think Boris Johnson is a profoundly bad force in the universe, but I do recall feeling the editing of one of his appearances on a UK TV show (Have I Got News For You) was patently unfair, as he was asserting that calling small four wheeled vehicles 'quad-bikes' was etymologically unsound. His point (I imagine - the broadcast did not include the justification) was that 'bike' is a corruption of bicycle, in turn rooted from 'bi', referring to the two wheels.

Udik3• 6 years ago

and assume it's sufficiently cromulent for formal use

Ha! Good one.

the use of the word 'decimate' as an alternative spelling for 'destroy'

An alternative spelling? I don't think so.

Jedd4• 6 years ago

The claim was made that common usage defines meaning (I don't entirely agree), and that the masses had spoken, as it were, and determined that decimate no longer has any notion of 1/10th of something being removed, but rather the word's meaning is now functionally identical to destroy or devastate (I don't agree with this either).

My point is/was that if that claim is true, then the choice of which word to use is purely one of aesthetics rather than exercising any nuance of meaning or intent -- a regrettably poor evolution for a language.

ergothus• 6 years ago

In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt a word that sounds sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire

This seems an excessively negative take on it.

How do we learn new words? Sure, we COULD look up the definitions, but (1) who bothers, and (2) we have plenty of evidence that definitions are so vague as to be useless. (I recall arguing with my high school english teacher about "moot", which we had as aa vocab word with a definition that didn't match my colloquial understanding).

So as adults, as teens, tweens, and before, most of our language is learned from contextual usage. Which is a terrible way to maintain accuracy. When I get stumped with newer terminology, my friends that USE the new words are often at a loss to explain them (one spent 30 mins trying to explain "kappa") because they don't know a formal definition, they know it when they see it.

We can be smug and superior about the "less literate" trying to be impressive, but honestly, that applies to all of us, we are just mocking those that get caught.

Jedd4• 6 years ago

Yes, I concede it's a bit of a bugbear - apologies for the negativity.

The idea that not spending the requisite minute or so to look up meaning and usage of a new word is acceptable behaviour of adults seems depressingly defeatist. We don't consider this an acceptable attitude during a child's dozen or more years of formal education, and realistically most adults have easy & rapid access to authoritative sources.

That our languages should then be (re)defined by these torpid users -- well that's just a horrible deal.

throwawayexodus• 6 years ago

It's particularly ironic to trying to make usage of 'irregardless' seem like reaching for unearned language skills since it is a real word, being several hundred years old. You could benefit from looking into the actual standing of this word - is it possible that you're the one who's reaching?

Jedd4• 6 years ago

Ironic?

There's plenty of words from several hundred years ago that are no longer considered part of current language(s). In any case, I don't believe Bob was uttering the word out of a charming fondness for etymological anachronisms, so much as pretentious ignorance.

daffy6• 6 years ago

I wonder, are there any statistics on descriptivist and prescriptivist attitudes in various groups? Or any recent defenses of prescriptivism?

kazinator4• 6 years ago

Merriam-Webster labels the word as "nonstandard" and recommends that regardless be used, all the while assuring readers that "irregardless" is indeed a word that has been in use by English speakers for "well over 200 years" and by "a large number of people across a wide geographic range and with a consistent meaning".

And, note, that same dictionary makes no disparaging remarks about the abuse of "literally" as a generic intensifier; it simply cites that usage as one of the meanings. The abuse of "literally" is more recent than "irregardless".

That tells you that "irregardless" is quite the lexical pariah. A major dictionary like Merriam is not able to wholeheartedly accept it in spite of the word's age and stability.

NoSorryCannot• 6 years ago

One of the chief functions of a mainstream dictionary is to guide users on usage. Irregardless of the principles possessed by Merriam-Webster's editors, they still have to warn readers when a usage will be conspicuous. Chumming the water for pedants can only be a distraction.

mjburgess• 6 years ago

The abuse of "literally" is more recent than "irregardless".

It certainly is not. The complaints are recent. This usage is hundreds of years old.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

kazinator4• 6 years ago

I strongly suspect that a new class of abuse is recent.

literally is actually reasonable as an intensifer for a figurative situation. I.e. the speaker is asking you to forget that you're just using an extreme figure of speech for a situation that is actually mild, but instead imagine it literally happening. I.e. the situation I'm describing is in fact so intense, that please pay attention to the figure of speech, since it is utterly fitting.

What we have now is literally just being applied randomly where there is no figure of speech, or not even a plausible figure of speech, as in:

I literally just moved here from New York last week; do you know where I can get a decent bagel?

Here, "literally" doesn't inform us that a plausible metaphor is actual ("moved here from New York" is not a common figure of speech with a special meaning, and is vanishingly unlikely to be interpreted as such), and doesn't ask us to get a more intense sense of a metaphor by imagining it as actually happening: the move actually happened, that's all.

The word is just a morsel of pure verbiage.

WarOnPrivacy4• 6 years ago

"Dethaw" - to unfreeze something prior to cooking. It's something my ex imprinted on my kids.

The court was quick to give me custody, once I brought that up.

WarOnPrivacy4• 6 years ago

I feel the evolution of language reflects important details about the culture wielding it.

I think a strong example is the word 'cult'. It once referred to a small sect or faith - and that's all. Leaders of established sects so often demonized small, competing faiths that cult became redefined to refer to evil and dangerous groups of worshipers. Notably, no other word ever emerged to take it's place.

I really wanted a tool to evidence how changes in language reflected changes in society's beliefs. I figured an authoritarian source of English definitions would be that tool but there isn't any such thing.*

In the end I had to adopt the more difficult approach of finding examples that my audience could relate with.

* (For a time I believed that the Oxford English Dictionary was that source, due to the 60-odd years between the 1st and 2nd editions. I didn't realize tho that supplements were added on an ongoing basis.)

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/0knTf

throw7• 6 years ago

paywall (didn't read). I had a co-worker who used to use irregardless. I didn't say anything. My own personal pet-peeve is the phrase "that begs the question...", and then the speaker raises a question. No. That's not begging the question. sigh.

At this point in "post post-modernism"? I guess my line in the sand is pronunciation of proper nouns. Cue the "gif" vs "jif" debate.

wdr1• 6 years ago

Its ironic how upset people get over the use of "irregardless."

cafard• 6 years ago

"""(It's regardless, Caroline, not irregardless," Lorena said gently. Caroline huffily replied that regardless was a footless, weak word and got you nowhere, that on the other hand you threw in the word irregardless and won any argument hands down."""

Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

“Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

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