by Kory Stamper
I answered these complaints for years and in time came to an uneasy accord with myself. I had looked at the evidence, and yeah, “irregardless” is used plenty in edited print. Accordingly, it merited entry into our dictionaries. But I was never going to like “irregardless,” and I was never going to think it was a good entry, and I was still going to hold the opinion that people who used “irregardless” were, at best, sloppy as hell.
That changed in 2003, when I was now a managing editor overseeing a big chunk of the editorial correspondence. An e-mail came down the transom claiming that “irregardless” was the “superlative form” of regardless—among educated Mississippians, in any event.
I took my glasses off and rubbed my eyes until I saw fireworks. It was early; perhaps I wasn’t fully caffeinated, or even awake. Perhaps this was a nightmare, and when I looked again, that e-mail would say that “irregardless” was stinky and y’all are wrong.
I looked. No dice.
The superlative form of any adjective or adverb is the form that denotes an extreme or unsurpassed degree or level of adjective- or adverbness. Usually superlatives for adjectives are the “-est” form of the word: “nice” and “nicest,” “warm” and “warmest.” But not always: “best” is the superlative of “good,” “most interesting” the superlative of “interesting.”
Superlatives can be used only with adjectives or adverbs that are gradable; that is, ones that can have different degrees of themselves—“cold,” for instance, can get “colder” and even “coldest”—or can be more or less of themselves: honesty can be measured as “more honest” or “less honest.” Can “regardless” be gradable? I didn’t think so; at least it didn’t sound right. My sprachgefühl remained steadfastly quiet. Could something be “more regardless”? No. Well, this correspondent clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. The part of my brain that likes to prove it’s the smartest thing in the room piped up: you know that people use grammatical terms imprecisely. It may be that “irregardless” isn’t the superlative form of “regardless,” as my correspondent claimed, but an intensive form of “regardless,” just like the infix “fucking” turns “absolutely” into the intensive “absofuckinglutely.” But why in the world would a word that is supposed to be an intensive form use a prefix (“ir-”) that means “not”—a prefix that is, in a way, a minimizer? Because, I reasoned, this whole line of thinking and the claim that my correspondent had made were both bullshit.
Now, I was not about to answer this e-mail, because in order to do so, I would have to investigate, and if five years of lexicography had taught me anything, it was that going through the evidence might lead to my being unswervingly wrong about a word I still deeply felt was bogus. I knew that if the evidence proved me wrong about “irregardless,” then I was no better than the blustering, fustigating peevers who wrote to complain about lesser sins like the noun “above” or the existence of the word “moist.”*3 In other words, even though I knew English didn’t work this way, in my heart I wanted “irregardless” to be ugly and morally wrong so that I could feel smart and morally right. I had, in this instance, bought into the lie I just spent several pages demolishing. I passed the e-mail along to another editor for response, then pushed back from my desk and walked too casually over to our citation files.
The raw material used in writing dictionary definitions are called “citations.” They’re snippets of words used in the wild and usually in edited prose. Each citation contains a highlighted word, a little lexical gold nugget embedded in its context, and citations are pulled from everywhere and everything, from books to ads to personal letters to newspapers to anything with print on it. These are the things lexicographers evaluate in order to define a word; every entry in a dictionary is justified with fistfuls of citations. At Merriam-Webster, the citation files are both paper and electronic; the paper citation files take up a solid third of the floor and date back to the mid-nineteenth century.
I dragged my finger over the drawer labels until I found the one that housed all the paper citations for “irregardless,” then slid it open. It’s pretty unlikely, I thought, plucking a stack of index cards from the file, that “irregardless” was an intensive form of “regardless,” but I should do my due diligence.
Almost immediately, I ran across this snippet of use:
I remembered the magnitude of his problems—problems I was just beginning to truly understand—as a black man and as an artist, growing up poor, forced to endure the racist terrorism of the American South. He was unlucky in love, and no prince of a parent. Irregardless, as the old people said, and as Mr. Sweet himself liked to say, not only had he lived to a ripe old age…, but he had continued to share all his troubles and his insights with anyone who would listen, taking special care to craft them for the necessary effect. He continued to sing.
I leaned my head against the cool metal of the cabinet and let this swish around my brain. There was something peculiar about this “irregardless”—the emphasis it’s given in the text, in particular. It’s italicized; it’s set off with that “as the old people said”; it almost seems to act as a long wave of the hand, one that will forestall any further discussion on the previous point—like a more highfalutin version of “anyhoo.” You don’t see this sort of emphasis with most written uses of “irregardless.” Those uses are unremarkable, save for the fact that they use the word “irregardless.” No italics, no setting off with “as the old people said,” no nada. I checked the citation again; it had been rejected as supporting evidence for the current entry for “irregardless.” In other words, this particular use of “irregardless” wasn’t covered by the existing definition for “irregardless” (which is “regardless”). Another clue that this use of “irregardless” was different. I almost put the stack of citations back, but my sprachgefühl rattled my brain. You know you want an answer to this once and for all, it taunted.
And so I went spelunking. I found evidence of this peculiar “irregardless” dating back to the 1860s, sprinkled throughout the country, from New Orleans to New York. Several instances of “irregardless” appear in proximity to a “regardless,” which sure looks like a deliberate choice that means “irregardless” isn’t just a flat synonym of “regardless”:
The language of the people would be infinitely improved if all children were forced to learn Bible verses—and they ought to be regardless of religion.
If one-tenth the time expended upon literature were expended upon study of the Bible as the climax of art in literature (irregardless of moral effect), how much sweeter and purer English as she is spoken, would become!
My sprachgefühl giggled and ran circles around my brain. If “irregardless” is a synonym of “regardless,” and the writer felt that “regardless” was perfectly adequate for the previous paragraph, why use a word in the following paragraph that was, by the time this showed up in print, well on its way to being despised?
The early signs of disfavor show up in the late nineteenth century, when there is a spate of them set off in quotation marks in opinion pieces, a little linguistic sneer at the object of scorn. “If the Board sees proper to authorize Mr. Leland to carry on their negotiations,” a writer for The Weekly Kansas Chief huffs in 1888 (in a typical use), “we may continue to announce that Mr. Leland has secured such and such a compromise, ‘irregardless’ of the displeasure of the Troy Times, the tool of Guthrie, the bondholders’ attorney.” There’s also the claim that the word is new, a surefire way to get people riled up about it. The Atchison Daily Globe shares this bit of breaking news with its readers in 1882: “Parson Twine has a new word—irregardless.”
What’s remarkable about all this is that the word’s earliest uses in print, from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, are unremarkable. There are no scare quotes, no italics, no [sic]s—just the word appearing in print as if it were any other word. But by the end of the nineteenth century, it’s suddenly become evidence of an undernourished mind:
The REPORTER has been given a copy of the following actual report, submitted to his trustee by a Jefferson township teacher a few days since:
“I have been trying to bend all into some regular years work. The school formerly not being graded at all, and allowed to run at random in their books. I found many obstacles and difficulties to overcome. Keep the scholars in regular year’s work irregardless of their desire, is my best judgment. Strive to make good citizens of the scholars in school I have. But had poor citizens to begin with. Therefore, they are not ideal citizens in a school yet by any means.”
The trustee suggests that it would probably be inuseless to suggest anything for these unrestless scholars who are so irregardless of their conduct.
The paper’s very pointed response to this use of “irregardless” echoes the common complaint today: you can’t use a prefix (“ir-”) that means “not” and a suffix (“-less”) that essentially means “not” and expect that the word resulting from such a jumble is going to be understandable. Though it’s worth noting that this very construction—[not][word][not] meaning [word][not]—showed up much earlier in English. The written record is sprinkled with words like “unboundless” and “irrespectless,” among a few dozen others, and we have evidence of this sort of tomfoolery back to the fifteenth century. Why are there so many of these stupid and illogical compounds in the written record? Logic be damned: everybody knows that the more syllables you slap onto a word, the smarter you sound. The Logansport Reporter is the first to also slyly touch on a major underlying irritation with “irregardless”: it’s dialectal and therefore sounds uneducated. This, again, appears to be an opinion created well after the fact of the word’s existence, but no matter.
Think of English as a river. It looks like one cohesive ribbon of water, but any potamologist*4 will tell you that rivers are actually made up of many different currents—sometimes hundreds of them. The interesting thing about rivers is, alter one of those currents and you alter the whole river, from its ecosystem to its course. Each of the currents in the river English is a different kind of English: business jargon, specialized vocabulary used in the construction industry, academic English, youth slang, youth slang from 1950, and so on. Each of these currents is doing its own thing, and each is an integral part of English.
One type of current you find in the river English is dialect. Dialects are little subsets of a language, and they have their own vocabulary, syntax, phonology, and grammar that sometimes overlap with other dialects of the main language and sometimes don’t. “Y’all” is a dialectal term for the second-person plural pronoun; it’s completely standard in some dialects of American English, particularly the ones in the South, and while it’s common to hear speakers of those dialects use it easily, it’s not a normal part of the dialect we call Standard English.
We tend to think of dialects (insofar as we think of them at all) as regional—Southern English, Boston English, Texan—but different social classes, ethnicities, and age-groups can have their own dialects. That means that dialects can be polarizing; they and their speakers are often subject to stereotype and scrutiny.
I am a passionate defender of the linguistic worth of dialects out of self-defense: I have been the subject of that sort of stereotype and scrutiny. I grew up a working-class white kid in a Mexican and black school, where the main dialects spoken were Chicano English and African-American Vernacular English. I was the odd kid out: I natively spoke a weird mishmash of North Inland, holdovers from my parents’ Great Lakes upbringings, and General Western American, the big regional dialect of my home state of Colorado. But this is knowledge gained in hindsight, of course: at the time, I was just a hapless dorky kid who wanted to fit in with my peers. Like a sponge, I began soaking up bits and pieces of each culture and its dialect while at school. I listened to Gloria Estefan and El DeBarge, Tejano and R&B; I played double Dutch and Chinese jump rope; I called my friends “chica” and “muchacho” and “homey” and “girlfriend.”
As we got older, the way we talked became political. I watched parents push their kids to talk “like a white person,” to linguistically pass, because they had spent a lifetime calling businesses like the cable company and hearing the secretary’s lips smack over their Chicano lilt or the cadence of their blackness, while she demurred that they weren’t going to be able to set up an appointment for, oh, dear, quite a while, you understand. I came of age before the Great Ebonics Controversy, when white people despaired that letting black students speak Ebonics*5 (their native dialect) in the classroom would usher in the end of English and “proper education” as we know it. But long before the rest of the world was aware of the politics of sounding black, I had friends split over whether sounding white was a sellout and whether sounding black was playing into a racial stereotype. Some friends dropped “homey” in favor of “guys”; others dropped “homey” in favor of “nigga.” My Mexican friends began to work on dropping their uptalk, toning down their lilt; they got sick of classmates in the halls sneering “illegal” at them and telling them to go back to Mexico, a country they weren’t born in and had never visited.
If they didn’t make the decision on their own, they were forced into it: I had one social studies teacher who proclaimed to us on the first day of class that everyone was expected to speak “correct and proper English” in class and a failure to do so would mean marks off on participation. Among the transgressions he would mark people down for were failure to sound the g at the end of any “-ing” word (“g-dropping,” a typical marker of African-American Vernacular English); substituting a long e for the i in words like “growing” and “fill” (“tensing the lax /ɪ/,” a phonological quirk of Chicano English); slouching in your chair and mumbling (“mutiny,” a marker of being a teenager in a class taught by a jerk). My friend Stephanie, who was black, and I lolled on her living room rug after class, knocking our tennis shoes together and fuming about the rule while doing our current events homework. “I don’t need no old white man telling me how to speak ‘proper English,’ ” she grumbled. “I already speak it.” Her mother hollered from the kitchen, “Some white man, Stephanie. You don’t need some white man telling you to speak proper English.”
I was not unaffected: One day I was telling my mom about my school day, and she cut me off. “Can you queet talkeeng like deez?” she mimicked. “We don’ talk like deez.” I was bewildered. “I’m just talking,” I said, and in the heavy silence afterward she said, “You know, your friends probably think you’re making fun of them when you talk like that.” Whether it was disingenuous or not, it worked: I was suddenly, keenly aware that I looked white but sounded black or Chicana and that this reflected somehow poorly on me. I was from that point onward very careful about the types of words that came out of my mouth and how they sounded. I abandoned uptalk; I stopped g-dropping and /ɪ/ tensing and did my level best to sound smoothly, blandly western and white.
As careful as I was, my dialect still betrayed me when I relocated to New England for college. The way I spoke sounded completely normal to my ears, but drop that dialect smack into the middle of Massachusetts and suddenly I was a big ol’ hick. My roommate used to make fun of how flat and wide my vowels were; I spoke so slowly that one classmate assumed I had a speech impediment. I said “howdy” often, and in response one deeply stupid (or cruel) woman asked if I rode a horse to school and had electricity where I grew up. Each comment, no matter how it was phrased, was intended to prove one thing: I was outside, a stranger. I was not from here, and so was exoticized or ostracized accordingly.
It wasn’t until much later—once I began studying English—that I realized how important dialects are to a language. They give us lots of vocabulary, and their proliferation is a sign of linguistic growth. It wouldn’t be overstating it to say that without dialects there is no language. The more I learned about dialects, the more I respected them. Dialects that might seem “uneducated” or “low” are actually full of a complex grammar that you, a nonnative speaker of tha
t dialect, can’t understand. In African-American Vernacular English, for instance, there’s a difference between “he been sick,” in which “been” stands in for Standard English’s present perfect “has been,” and “he been sick,” where that stressed “been” marks that the action or state came into being a long time ago. Native speakers of AAVE have no problem navigating the two “beens.”
While everyone thinks that they speak Standard English, no one natively speaks it: Standard English is itself a dialect based on a written ideal that we learn as we gain education. If we all spoke Standard English as a native dialect, then books on “good grammar” or “proper English” would be useless; we’d already know it because it’d be our very first dialect. All the rules about terminal prepositions, the correct use of “dilemma,” and not using “snuck” would be pointless: we would absorb those finer points of usage as easily as we absorb oxygen. That we have to learn Standard English proves that it is not our native dialect. But that’s okay: native English speakers actually speak multiple dialects of English and can usually switch between them depending on the circumstance.*6 Dialects are great!
“Irregardless,” though? Can’t we just quietly ignore it?
Here’s the other interesting thing about rivers: they flow wherever they damned well please.
—
I had other work to do, and so set “irregardless” aside, but whenever I had a spare moment, I’d poke around in the correspondence files to see if other people claimed that the word was standard where they were from (they did), or I’d log in to one of the databases to see if I could find more evidence of an intensive or emphatic “irregardless” (I did). Over time, something insidious happened: in all this looking at “irregardless,” I began to actually appreciate it. Make no mistake: I wasn’t going to use it or champion its use, but I admired its tenacity, its ability to hang on to the periphery of Standard English for so long. It was a totally illogical coinage, but just one among many other illogical coinages (like “unravel”) that have flourished for centuries. What if, I mused one day driving home from work, “irregardless” developed a nuanced emphatic use in dialectal speech, and when the word was committed to paper and spread abroad, it was flattened into just meaning “regardless” without shape or nuance? It’s hard to convey this sort of emphasis in writing, especially when few people were willing to commit to print a word that was called “uneducated.” That means, I realized, that in spite of all the violent hatred leveled at “irregardless,” it was not only still in use but had maybe developed a second, emphatic meaning sometime back in the nineteenth century that had just barely clung to life but spread through various speaking communities like wildfire. “Irregardless” wasn’t just a static irritation: it was an active force of language growth. My eyes widened, and I giggled and slapped the steering wheel. I had broken. “Irregardless” was no longer the grammarian’s bête noire and the harbinger of linguistic doom to me: it was a word with depth, with history, with some attitude.