The world is rapidly changing and evolving before our very eyes.
In Major League Baseball, you can now plant a runner on second base in extra innings—so he can score quickly and easily and thus speed up the game and eliminate marathon extra inning affairs.
In the halls of the U.S. Congress, a key component of statesmanship was learning how to extend your hand across the aisle and reach a compromise with your rival on an important piece of legislation. Today, “compromise” is a dirty word and rarely practiced in our nation’s capital.
Singer Kate Smith was once synonymous with the singing of “God Bless America,’’ especially at baseball games. Today, her rendition of Irving Berlin’s 1918 patriotic song is prohibited at a number of MLB stadiums, including Yankee Stadium, Progressive Field in Cleveland, and the Wells Fargo Center (for Philadelphia Flyers games in the NHL) because of two racially insensitive songs Ms. Smith, “The First Lady of Radio,” sang in the 1930s.
Now, apparently, the word ‘’irregardless’’ has become acceptable in the English language.
At least in Webster’s-Merriam Dictionary.
According to an article by NPR,"Irregardless is included in our dictionary because it has been in widespread and near-constant use since 1795," the dictionary's staff wrote in a "Words of the Week"roundup. "We do not make the English language; we merely record it."
I worked in a few newsrooms as a news researcher over the years, I think if I ever voiced the word “irregardless,’’ members of the copy desk would grab me by my ears and toss me out the window, head first.
On the second day of the U.S. Supreme Court 1986-1987 term, Chief Justice William Rehnquist scolded a lawyer who used “irregardless,” saying, “I feel bound to inform you there is no word irregardless in the English language. The word is regardless,” Rehnquist thundered.
The distinguished language maven and newspaper columnist, William Safire, took up the issue of “irregardless’’ in a January 15, 2006 column in The New York Times. “And what of irregardless -- as so many readers ask, is that a word? The opening ir- means "not" or "without" and the closing -less also means "without," which turns the locution into arrant nonsense” Safire wrote.
Richard Nixon’s former speech writer went on to explain that “irregardless” was first cited in Harold Wentworth's dialect dictionary in 1912, and the word, according to Safire, was most likely intended as a joke. Safire wrote that many people don’t get the joke and mistakenly use it. “Because it is mainly a jocular word,” Safire explained, “the answer is yes, irregardless is a word, and that is why lexicographers put it in dictionaries with a rolling of the eyes and a warning not to take it seriously.”
David Scott Kastan, Professor of English at Yale University, while acknowledging the redundancy of “irregardless,’’ points out that “language is a funny thing.” “Words,” Kastan says, “come to mean what people think they mean, and over time meanings change (look at the history of the word “nice”), and sometimes even reverse themselves (look at the history of the word “individual”).”
As an English professor, “I wouldn’t use it,’’ Kastan says, but I wouldn’t be surprised or much dismayed to hear it used, although I would correct it on a student paper.”
Lee Clark Mitchell, a Professor of Belles-Lettres in the Department of English at Princeton University, observes that the “American language itself, has always been rather unwieldly, shape-shifting construct.” “But we’re not like the French,” Mitchell says, “who have always sustained a distinctly more corrective notion of language. In our free-wheeling national fashion, words constantly shift, evolve, drop out and re-introduce themselves, in all the mistaken forms that pedagogues like myself try to rein in. And ending a sentence this way with a preposition is another of those broken rules.”
“So, it seems to me,” Professor Mitchell further explained, “that dictionaries—American, at least—should do what they mostly do, even Merriam-Webster. That is, they need to give us words as they exist, and then (according to their boards and advisors) indicate whether those are acceptable in standard speech or alternatively an example of slang or otherwise “incorrect usage.”
Meanwhile, James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University takes a more light-hearted view of the adverb. “It’s not a word I’d ever use myself, as it sounds like something Eddie Haskell would say on Leave It to Beaver, phony and self-important. It’s the kind of word that more often than not is followed by a half-truth or a lie. My advice as an English professor: keep it simple. Don’t use a big word when a small one will do.”
Jack Lynch, Professor of English in the department of English at Rutgers University-Newark, cautions that just because you find a word in a dictionary doesn’t necessarily mean it’s acceptable. “That’s a judgment dictionaries don’t make,’’ Lynch points out. “Merriam does mark it “nonstandard,” their way of saying it’s not universally accepted. With or without the usage note, though, no one is under any obligation to use it, to like it, or even to like the people who use it.”
As a practical matter, Lynch thinks “irregardless’’ is a poor word choice. “I wouldn’t use it other than ironically, and if students use it, I’d advise them they should probably choose another word. But dictionaries aren’t guardians of the language”, Lynch cautions. “Most of the major English dictionaries have been disavowing that mission since at least 1755, so we shouldn’t look to them for that sort of guidance.”
“I remember being cautioned in high school against this nonsensical intensifier, which means no more than “regardless” --setting aside a regard for, or notwithstanding. What does irregardless say that regardless does not already? I wince at this,” Susan J. Wolfson, Professor of English at Princeton University told me.
Weary, Wolfson concedes she lost the battle long ago on “preserving the important difference between uninterested (I don’t care; why do you?) and disinterested (neutrally attentive: I can see all sides of the question; I consider this without personal interest).”
“Language is a living culture, not a dead set of rules, Wolfson observed. “Still, I like distinctions and refinements.”
Source: Grammarly.com
***
So, now that we know that academia takes a rather dim view of the acceptance of ‘’irregardless’’ in a sentence or even in everyday conversation, what about newspapers and websites?
Are we approaching a time, when major news organizations will raise the white flag and permit “irregardless’’ to be used by their writers in news articles?
John Daniszewski, Editor-at-Large and Vice President for Standards at the Associated Press, answered with a resounding “NO!” when asked if AP considers ‘’irregardless’’ as acceptable. “AP style is to use “regardless.” We define “irregardless” as a double negative, and it is therefore incorrect in our book,” Daniszewski responded.
According to a representative from the Standards Desk at the New York Times, “the dictionary we use, Webster's New World College Dictionary, calls irregardless a nonstandard variant of regardless. That means we will not be using it. We'll stick with regardless.”
Courtney Rukan, Deputy multiplatform editing chief at the Washington Post, explained the Post’s policy to me this way. “Although irregardless is acceptable via Webster’s now and usage can overtake grammar, we are not ready to give up the ghost on regardless,” Rukan says. “Titled vs. entitled is another usage case we’d keep to fighting, too, as we have a number of exceptions to dictionaries that we maintain in our stylebook. We may acquiesce to irregardless in the future, as we did with “play down vs. downplay,” but we do still like to find the right line between common (internet) usage and the principles of language at large.”
Similarly, Bill Power, news editor and style book co-editor of the Wall Street Journal, responded, “we are no fans of irregardless in formal writing. Our base dictionary, Webster's 5th College, does include it as a word now, but only in informal (and often humorous) contexts. So, it doesn't qualify as the best choice for our news articles. We have entries in both our stylebook and our spell-checker that advise our writers and editors to stick with regardless.”
So, take heart language connoisseurs. Though irregardless might have crept into some dictionaries while no one was looking, its usage in the written word and everyday language appears to have been overwhelming rejected.
Thank goodness; we wouldn’t want Pulitzer Prize winning columnist William Safire and one-time author of the New York Times “On Language,’’ column to be rolling in his grave.
--Bill Lucey
August 2, 2020
