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

> 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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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).

> copying other people’s behavior without asking why

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

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!”

> and `flammable'.

Which has the same definition as inflammable.

This has always been inconceivable in my mind.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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.)

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.

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

Host your own dictionary and insist that theirs is wrong.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

Shibboleth