My last post, “12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone Who Writes about Grammar Mistakes Makes,” drew a lot of comments, some supportive and some critical. But no point drew as much ire as my claim that irregardless is a word. Some stated flatly, “Irregardless is not a word.” One ignorantly demanded, “Show me a dictionary that actually contains that word.” (I could show him several.) Still others argued that it was a double negative, that it was logically and morphologically ill-formed and thus had no meaning. One commenter said that “with the negating preface [prefix] ‘ir-‘ and the negating suffix ‘-less’, it is a double negative” and that “it is not a synonym with ‘regardless’.” Another was even cleverer, saying, “The prefix ir-, meaning not, changes the meaning of the word regardless, so not only is it not a standard word, but it’s also misused in nearly all cases.” But these arguments still miss the point: irregardless is indeed a word, and it means the same thing as regardless.
In my last post I argued that there’s a clear difference between a word like irregardless and a nonword like flirgle. By any objective criterion, irregardless is a word. It has an established form and meaning, it’s used in speech and occasionally in writing, and it’s even found in reputable dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary (though it is, quite appropriately, labeled nonstandard). We can identify its part of speech (it’s an adverb) and describe how it’s used. By contrast, though, consider flirgle. You don’t know what its part of speech is or how to use it, and if I were to use it in a sentence, you wouldn’t know what it meant. This is because it’s just something I made up by stringing some sounds together. But when someone uses irregardless, you know exactly what it means, even if you want to pretend otherwise.
This is because words get their wordhood not from etymology or logic or some cultural institution granting them official status, but by convention. It doesn’t matter that nice originally meant “ignorant” or that contact was originally only a noun or that television is formed from a blend of Greek and Latin roots; what matters is how people use these words now. This makes some people uncomfortable because it sounds like anarchy, but it’s more like the ultimate democracy or free market. We all want to understand one another and be understood, so it’s in our mutual interest to communicate in ways that are understandable. Language is a self-regulating system guided by the invisible hand of its users’ desire to communicate—not that this stops people from feeling the need for overt regulation.
One commenter, the same who said, “Irregardless is not a word,” noted rather aptly, “There is absolutely no value to ‘irregardless’ except to recognize people who didn’t study.” Exactly. There is nothing wrong with its ability to communicate; it’s only the word’s metacommunication—that is, what it communicates about its user—that is problematic. To put it a different way, the problem with irregardless is entirely social: If you use it, you’ll be thought of as uneducated, even though everyone can understand you just fine.
One friend of mine said, “Accepting it as a word is the first part of the slippery slope.” This seems like a valid fear, but I believe it is misplaced. First of all, we need to be clear about what it means to accept irregardless as a word. I accept that it’s a word, but this does not mean that I find the word acceptable. I can accept that people do all kinds of things that I don’t like. But the real problem isn’t what we mean by accept; it’s what we mean by word. When people say that something isn’t a word, they aren’t really making a testable claim about the objective linguistic status of the word; they’re making a sociolinguistic evaluation of the word. They may say that it’s not a word, but they really mean that it’s a word that’s not allowed in Standard English. This is because we think of Standard English as the only legitimate form of English. We think that the standard has words and grammar, while nonstandard dialects have nonwords and broken grammar, or no grammar at all. Yes, it’s important to recognize and teach the difference between Standard English and nonstandard forms, but it’s also important to be clear about the difference between facts about the language and our feelings about the language.
But the irregardless-haters can also take heart: The word has been around for at least a century now, and although many other new words have been coined and become part of Standard English in that time, irregardless shows no signs of moving towards acceptability. Most people who write for publication are well aware of the stigma attached to it, and even if they aren’t, few copyeditors are willing to let it into print. It’s telling that of the Oxford English Dictionary‘s eight citations of the word, two merely cite the word in other dictionaries, three more are mentions or citations in linguistics or literary journals, and one more appears to be using the word ironically. We talk about the word irregardless—mostly just to complain about it—far more than we actually use it.
So yes, irregardless is a word, even though it’s nonstandard. You don’t have to like it, and you certainly don’t have to use it, but you also don’t have to worry about it becoming acceptable anytime soon.
:) xoxo
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