chic\'s fridge said:
Luca:
You been spending too much time under water...with the fishies. Check your Funk and Wagnalls or Webster's and you will find the word irregardless. FYI: Afterall, I won my 4th grade spelling bee.
CF
I don't mean to thread hijack, but......
[Q] From Randall E Larson in Tucson: “I have more than once seen the corruption
irregardless used in some standard writings and with a straight face. Has it become acceptable?”
[A] The word is thoroughly and consistently condemned in all American references I can find. But it’s also surprisingly common. It’s formed from
regardless by adding the negative prefix
ir-;
as regardless is already negative, the word is considered a logical absurdity.
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”.