OT: Incurable pedantry (Was: Emphasis on proper address...)

[jlv230]

No: HPFGUIDX 131457

> > Dung:
> > Absolutely no offence meant, but there is NO SUCH WORD AS 
> > IRREGARDLESS.  You mean irrespective or regardless.
> > Sorry. I'll get me coat.
> 
> Amiable Dorsai:
> Sure there is: it's right here in my "Webster's New International
> Dictionary" (2nd ed.)--right between "irrefutability" and
> "irregeneracy".  Webster doesn't seem to care for it much, but there 
> it is.
> 
> Of course, you have an unalienable right to your opinion.

Ah, a descriptivist, prescripivist debate. For the record, my copy 
of `Mind the Gaffe' – the Penguin guide to common errors in English – 
states that there is *no such word*. It is also not mentioned in my 
copy of Chambers (UK) English dictionary. But people continue to use 
it, so therefore there /is/ such a word, QED.

Quoting from one of my favourite websites on language use 
(www.worldwidewords.org  - a useful resource for pedants like me):

"[Q] "I have more than once seen the corruption irregardless used in 
some standard writings and with a straight face. Has it become 
acceptable?"

"[A] The word is thoroughly and consistently condemned in all American 
references I can find. But it's also surprisingly common. It's formed 
from regardless by adding the negative prefix ir-; as regardless is 
already negative, the word is considered a logical absurdity.

"It's been around a while: the Oxford English Dictionary quotes a 
citation from Indiana that appeared in Harold Wentworth's American 
Dialect Dictionary of 1912. And it turns up even in the better 
newspapers from time to time: as here from the New York Times of 8 
February 1993: "Irregardless of the benefit to children from what he 
calls his `crusade to rescue American education,' his own political 
miscalculations and sometimes deliberate artlessness have greatly 
contributed to his present difficulties".

"But, as I say, it's still generally regarded by people with an 
informed opinion on the matter as unacceptable. The Third Edition of 
The American Heritage Dictionary states firmly that "the 
label `nonstandard' does not begin to do justice to the status of this 
word" and "it has no legitimate antecedents in either standard or 
nonstandard varieties of English". Some writers even try to turn it 
into a non-word, virtually denying its existence, which is pretty hard 
to do in the face of the evidence. The level of abuse hurled at the 
poor thing is astonishingly high, almost as great as that once 
directed at hopefully. It seems to have become something of a 
linguistic shibboleth.

"That's strange because, as Professor Laurence Horn of Yale University 
points out, the duplication of negative affixes is actually quite 
common in English. Few users query words such as debone and unravel 
because they are so familiar. In earlier times there were even more 
such words, many recorded from the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries: unboundless, undauntless, uneffectless, unfathomless and 
many others.

"Grammarians of the eighteenth century and after—who had a greater 
sense of logic than feel for the language—did much to stamp them out. 
They argued that, in language as in mathematics, two negatives make a 
positive: putting two negatives together cancels them out. This has 
been the basis for condemnation of statements like "I never said 
nothing to nobody", which aren't standard British or American English. 
But in many other languages—and in some local or dialectal forms of 
English both today and in earlier times—multiple negatives are 
intensifiers, adding emphasis.

"Irregardless has a fine flow about it, with a stronger negative feel 
than regardless that some people obviously find attractive. Indeed, 
the stress pattern of the word probably influenced the addition of the 
prefix, as the stress in regardless is on gar, which makes it sound 
insufficiently negative, despite the -less suffix.

"So the precedents are all on the side of irregardless and—despite the 
opinions of the experts—I suspect that the word will become even more 
popular in the US in the future. For the moment, though, it is best 
avoided in formal writing."

So there you go.