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“Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

economist.com

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Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#61

Post by daffy »

vbtemp wrote: post #55
irthomasthomas wrote: post #51

My favorite/worst example of language evolution is the word factoid. Factoid literally meant a thing resembling a fact (i.e. a false fact) which is believed to be true after being repeated in print. Now, those same writers who where presumably spreading factoids, have inverted its meaning to be 'a minor, but true fact' [0]. [0] http://www.doctoryourself.com/hoffer_factoids.html

Would a more correct version of a minor, true fact be a _factino_? Kind of like a Plutino or Neutrino?

Factule, perhaps, from the unattested but regular diminutive factulum.

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#62

Post by darksaints »

skissane wrote: post #21
gsk22 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just an ignorant American, but what is the issue with that definition? Lack of an explicit political goal?

Yes, “terrorism” has a political objective. Randomly killing people for non-political reasons, such as done by some mass shooters or serial killers, is not terrorism, even if in some cases it kills more people than many acts of terrorism do.

I suppose the word political could encompass this, but it should also be pointed out it is political in the sense of having an intended purpose for societal change. That goes beyond what most people consider politics. It could be religious, ethnocentric, ideological, philosophical, etc. Even the actions of the luddites could fall under terrorism.

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#63

Post by Aengeuad »

jasode wrote: post #23

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", othe…

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.

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#64

Post by hguant »

swiley wrote: post #58

The popularity of the word “irregardless” demonstrates a property of human thought and socialization that’s very important to most people here: that the majority of people (at least those that speak English) are perfectly happy copying other people’s behavior without asking why. More complex examples of this come from studies where people struggle to communicate the difference between Boolean operators (specifically…

I was a political philosophy major in college - it's interesting seeing how important being able to rigorously define what you're saying, and taking into account what your statements assume, is critically important for both engineering, and philosophy.

...also it turns out that dissecting a statement and pointing out the inconsistentsies is a great way to piss people off.

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#65

Post by posterboy »

swiley wrote: post #58

The popularity of the word “irregardless” demonstrates a property of human thought and socialization that’s very important to most people here: that the majority of people (at least those that speak English) are perfectly happy copying other people’s behavior without asking why. More complex examples of this come from studies where people struggle to communicate the difference between Boolean operators (specifically…

it's precisely the formal logic, albeit mostly in legal, that employs double negation to cover all bases, in case of doubt about the excluded middle, and importantly, to reverse liability of proof.

You are not not an idiot. I didn't say you were one, but I will leave the proof to the opposite to somebody else.

It might just be an intensifier, irregardless of the legalese, whenever it defaults to the law of excluded middle, that is, perhaps when the proof is not even considered relevant, whereas "regardless" implicitly connotes neglect.

Regardless ofyou being an idiot.

or Irregardless of you being perhaps an idiot.

Alas, double negation tends to be not very stable in informal speach, e.g. any "some", not any "none", not not any: "some", "any" or "all". This involves type coercion from the gradual to the binary interpretation (and it's terribly difficult to make explicit, exactly not trivially simple at least).

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#66

Post by throw0101a »

daffy wrote: post #50

The author seems to claim that `irregardless' is all right and that caring about it is caring too much and vain. He compares it to other malformed words such as `television' and `flammable'. But there seems to be a significant difference between these and that. While recognizing the malformedness of these words require knowledge of Greek and Latin, recognizing that of `irregardless' is trivial for anyone who is profi…

> and `flammable'.

Which has the same definition as inflammable.

This has always been inconceivable in my mind.

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#67

Post by jimhefferon »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #3

As the article points out, irregardless is pretty uncommon. I'll be much more horrified when Merriam-Webster begins defining terrorism the way that the Americans often use it in common discourse, i.e. , the attacker's acts were terrifying and the victims and community were terrorised, therefore he's a terrorist.

> pretty uncommon

Gee, I hear it a lot. Northern New England, US.

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#69

Post by bena »

082349872349872 wrote: post #11

> “irregardless: a word that distinguishes people who do not care much about English usage from those who care terribly—and want the world to know it.” In other words, a sibboleth? Exercise for hackers: what are the minimal code sequences one can write to distinguish between various x86 versions? various python versions? etc.

Shibboleth

Re: “Irregardless” is part of a penumbra of unorthodox English words

#70

Post by dgb23 »

tech2 wrote: post #43
gsk22 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just an ignorant American, but what is the issue with that definition? Lack of an explicit political goal?

I think the difference is the intent. If the intent of the act is the death (or other outcome) of a group of individuals then the act would be mass murder. If however the intent of the act is to use these acts to cause terror (the deaths are merely a means to that end) then the act is terrorism. Terror has been a tool of a number of political groups over the years. An easy example would be when the IRA bombing campai…

I like this definition very much.

However, would you for example include propaganda, which is specifically designed to spread fear? I always associated terrorism with physical violence.

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