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The Debate over "Irregardless" -- is it a Word?

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 13 2020, @11:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the First-to-Fall dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/887540598/the-debate-over-the-word-irregardless-is-it-a-word

All right. Let's settle something here. The word irregardless - is it a word or is it not a word? Well, this is a debate that Merriam-Webster is now weighing in on in a tweet saying that it is, in fact, a word. And that has led to a whole lot of reaction online.

Merriam-Webster has confirmed that "irregardless" is a word in the dictionary, despite concerns from teachers that it is not.

So fellow Soylentils, irregardless of my opinion, what do your think?

See Also:
Is 'Irregardless' a Real Word?
Definition of irregardless

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @04:07PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @04:07PM (#1020410)

    language. French is an example of a prescriptive language, they have a Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language that dictates standards like "information fallacieuse" instead of "fake news" and "chemise le plouc" for T-shirt.

    English dictionaries only document current usage, they do not dictate.

    This message brought to you by the *verbs* 'disrespect' and 'gift' and the sentence, 'May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?'

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @08:24PM (#1020652)

    English dictionaries do whatever the hell they want. As you said, we don't have a Royal Academy of the English Language. Therefore, your statement that English dictionaries are proscriptive is not true. There is no coherent policy, but I will grant that many dictionaries DO seem to get prescriptive when it comes to "offensive" words that are targets for elimination or alternatively promotion (neologisms, in the latter case) by the PC police. These "bad words" get marked "offensive" or "archaic."

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 14 2020, @03:17PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday July 14 2020, @03:17PM (#1021274)

    Just because dictionaries are descriptive doesn't mean that you can use words to mean anything you want: I'm looking at you, "literal" abusers.

    The whole point of language is so people can understand each other. If idiots keep misusing words so that things like "literally" gain two or more meanings you have to stop and sort out whenever you have a conversation, they fundamentally damage the idea of a shared language.

    Commenters online often have this moronic notion that prescriptivism is somehow "wrong" or "a disproved theory"--we need both descriptivism and prescriptivism, in sane balance. They're ways of looking at the issue, not falsifiable scientific theories (see also usage of "scientific" to refer to soft sciences like linguistics and other social areas).

    I'm not against the invention of new words, but when people try to tell me that clearly wrong already-existing constructions are now "right" because people use them that way, it gets under my skin.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"