In re Irregardless

Several readers have sent e-mails and left comments calling Roger Ailes to task for using "irregardless" in an earlier post about the ultracrepidarian Mickey Kaus. And they're right. All of the standard sources and commentaries look down upon the word.

Merriam-Webster:

Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.

Michael Quinion:

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.

American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Ed.:

Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir� prefix and �less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.

I blame it all on my Indiana public school education.