I just wanted to publicly thank the anonymous person who commented in a church meeting yesterday and used the word “regardless” properly. People like this make the world a better place, or at least easier to understand each other in.
Those who say “irregardless” should be sent to the grammatical equivalent of Guantanamo Bay until they get it all out of their system and unlearn all of the bad habits they picked up throughout the years.
“Ir-” is a negative prefix. If you are irreverent, you are the opposite of reverent. If you are irregular, you are the opposite of regular, or your pooper’s stuck.
The suffix “-less” is also a negative, depending on how it is used. If you are brainless, you do NOT have a brain. If you are penniless, you don’t have any money. If you are futless, you have no idea what’s going on (Hawaii humor, I’m helpless to resist).
You can irritate or irrigate or even feel irregular, but you can’t say “irregardless”.
Good post! I don’t have the ears to catch when someone says irregardless, but it would probably make me a little crazy. Just like when someone says ‘in lieu of’ without meaning ‘instead of’… and then there’s the one that we have to live with because it gets said over and over again… ‘each and every one of you’ which is redundant, but may be intended that way for emphasis… like it’s not enough to just say ‘each of you.’
Amen. My favorite, err, least favorite has always been “a whole nother” Another is the combination of “an” and “other”, not “a” and “nother”. Hence, one might say “a whole other”, but really should avoid “a whole nother”.