With Regard to Ir-

English is a difficult language, American English in particular. It is particularly difficult for people learning English as a second or third language; it is even more difficult for them when those of us who speak it as a first language ignore or simply don’t bother learning the rules ourselves.

This blog is going to be a rant. A personal, angry tirade against the misuse of words simply because of the lackadaisical way we Americans treat the English language. Enough is enough. Let us be proud of our language enough to at least learn when it is appropriate to adulterate it, and when it is not.

Sometimes, when people chuckle, they also snort. This leads us to a natural combination of the words chuckle and snort: Chortle. I believe it was Charles Dickens who gave us this word (interestingly, a similar combination of his names gives us Chickens, though I doubt that is where this word came from).

When people become flustered, they also often become frustrated, hence we have the obnoxious, yet reasonable word flustrated.

The above two paragraphs are indications of situations where it is acceptable to adulterate the language. I will now provide an instance of when it is not.

Regardless:

Adj. Having or showing no regard.

Adv. Without concern as to advice etc.

Idiom. In spite of, without regard for.

Irrespective:

Adj. without regard to something else.

As you can see from the similarities of the definitions of these two words, it should be reasonable to combine them to create a new, more powerful, all-inclusive word: irregardless.

But it is not reasonable to do so.

The prefix ir- denotes opposition. It is similar to the prefixes un-, ex-, dis-, and de-. Consider the word responsible: Attach the prefix ir-, and suddenly the word irresponsible stares us in the face. If I tell you that I was too lazy to make oatmeal and instead fed my 2 year old a hot fudge sundae Pop-Tart for breakfast, all joking aside, would you think I was being responsible or irresponsible?

You begin to see the power of the prefix ir-. I call it an oppositizer.

By the rules, irregardless cannot be a combination of regardless and irrespective, as it is the opposite of these words. Note that irrespective iteself starts with ir- and is therefore an opposite of its root word respective. Thus irregardless is synonymous with respective, and therefore, opposite of irrespective, and therefore mathematically proved as an opposite to regardless.

What an awful paragraph that was. I hope you all made it through safely.

Sadly for me, the word irregardless has been misused so often and by so many people that it has actually been added to some dictionaries as a synonym to regardless. This despite the fact (regardless of the fact) that they are essentially polar opposites of one another.

Intelligent people with whom I’ve had this or similar conversations have often used the generally legitimate argument that “language is always evolving” and that as long as the person speaking is understood by his intended listeners, then it doesn’t matter if the words used are the correct words or not. Successful communication has taken place.

While technically true, it shows a deep disrespect for the mechanics and the very intelligence which allow human language to exist at all. If we fall back on the lazy argument that “well, you understood me from the context,” we might as well go back to grunts and growls to get our point across.

It reminds me of a lamely humorous thing my cousins and I used to say when we were in Middle School: The word dude can mean anything you want, depending on how you say it. It is all about inflection, and facial affectations.

In many ways, that’s all language is: inflection and affectation. But it has evolved to be so much more than that, so much more reliable, precise, and indicative. While inflection and affectation remain important, indeed core, functions of language, we have specific words with specific meanings in order to more effectively transmit the information we need to convey. We have words which represent inflection and affectation in order to express these functions of language via the written word.

Who among us hasn’t secretly cringed a little at a friend, an acquaintance, a sibling, or a parent when we heard them say something like, “We was there an hour early.” Or “I seen them coming a mile away.” In the first case, “was” is a conjugation of the verb “to be,” and therefore correct… and yet still very much incorrect. Likewise “seen” is a past tense of “to see,” and yet it wasn’t the correct past tense.

If you’ve read this far, you probably already agree with me, so there’s nothing more to say about it. Keep up the good work. To all the rest of you (the minority who don’t agree but did read this far), I’d encourage you to make a well-thought-out argument in favor of misusing words in order to communicate more effectively, but I honestly doubt I’d read it. Maybe for a laugh, but I’d probably just end up with a raging headache.

After I wrote this blog, I did a quick Google search for "irregardless dictionary" since I once found a dictionary of stupid English (paraphrasing). I thought I'd link it here. Instead I came across a Grammar Girl article (Grammar Girl is a really good resource for when you're trying to remember the rules for things like lay vs. lie etc.) about regardless vs. irregardless. So I'm linking it instead. She just set my mind at ease about why irregardless is in some dictionaries. Phew! I can sleep again.