Have you heard? No,rather, have you seen,that we have a new word? Is it even new? Well not on folks’ lips surely but regardless of what you think, ‘irregardless’ is a real word, at least according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Did you,like me, scream into nothing above when you saw this? With your whole body cringing and goosebumps heavy all at once?
It’s just a word,right? No!
It’s English and not your language,why are you even reacting to this?
Take a deep breath,take a deep breath!
Listen folks, I had no intentions of learning and excelling at English myself until my parents and whoever else was involved decided I needed a school and it would be a school I would be instructed to in English. I learnt the a e i o u without wanting to until I was able to tell my teacher c and k without the o and r between them would not cork. So yes English is my business now and accepting irregardles as a word will give me one little sleepless night of course.
Over the years we have learnt of words that have made their way from just nuances and slang to being accepted as part of the English vocabulary. Not just English actually,even French. I learnt this as a French undergrad student. I can’t say for certain with other languages but we can guess it to be so.
Le mo setswaneng go na le mahoko a e leng gore badimo ba rona ha ba ka tla,ga bana go a itse, mme a dirisiwa ekete a tswa ko tshimolong ya puo.
So maybe there shouldn’t be such an uproar then with irregardless,yes? No!
Irregardless (I cringe) as a word goes against everything that you were ever taught. It negates twice in itself leaving it as a ….nothing!
But have folks stopped using it? No!
Have people accepted it? Maybe,but not me!
Does it being accepted now by Merriam-Webster dictionary make it a word? Barely!
Also who decides these things?
Swole, on-brand, screen time, savant syndrome, gig economy, unplug, receipts, hustle, buzzy, java!
You’re wondering what these are,right? Look at them again. These are some of the words that made it into the dictionary last year. Do you see how? I hope you do! They make sense,regardless that they didn’t exist a few years back. They’re for a reason and they didn’t have synonyms as yet either. I remember when I saw Stan in the list punching the air and exclaiming “I stan new words”. Nothing close to what I felt when Merrimack-Webster made the new irregardless announcement,irrespective of what English consumers thought! Ah well!
“No dictionary or combination of ditionaries contains every word that exists. new words are constantly being coined. … It is also possible to create words that are possibly correct (understandable) yet never used.” My hope for irregardless.
At the beginning of this year I had a discussion about floppy disks with my teenage daughter. She had absolutely no idea what that was or how it looked like. We looked it up! Do you know what else we found? A plethora of words that had got to the back of the word cupboard and then forgotten eventually. No one says dungarees anymore, and hootenanny and britches aren’t words that roll of folks’ tongues the way irregardless does, and this has got us here.
A fellow blogger wrote “I would rather you didnt use this word which feels like a illogical derivative of irrespective and regardless, there’s many other things I would rather people did not do such as squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle…
Use regardless instead”
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Hopes and Dreams Turn Into Goals When We Decide To Take Action And Set A Deadline!!!!! “CARPE DIEM- SEIZE THE DAY”