Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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.]

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.

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.

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

Host your own dictionary and insist that theirs is wrong.

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