Irregardless, We Are Not Bemused
As an audiobook narrator, your whole career involves reading words, deriving their meaning, knowing their correct pronunciation, and then speaking them into a microphone. As such, it’s important to have a pretty good command of language. You don’t have to be an etymologist, of course, but the more you know about words and how they go together, the better you will be at your job.
As a writer, knowledge of grammar, spelling, and usage is critical. And you have to love words, since they are the primary tools of your trade. I’ve always been something of a philologist, but in any case, I believe it’s the duty of conscientious writers everywhere to be champions of language, to educate if necessary, and even to proselytize against its corruption.
Which is why I can get a little hot under the collar when words are misspelled, mispronounced, or misused. When I hear someone using a word incorrectly—bemused, for example—I am rather like the person who quits smoking and then becomes an evangelist about the evils of “demon tobacco.” In other words, I become an annoying, pedantic ass!
“Bemused means confused, you bonehead! Not slightly amused!” At this point, the object of my wrath will usually look at me bemusedly, then flip me off (which is, of course, the appropriate response).
The trouble with bemused is that, to the uninitiated, slightly amused looks like what the word should mean. But when you understand that most words are made up of parts, and those parts have specific derivations and connotations, then you have valuable clues as to their meanings. The prefix be- means cause to be and muse means absorbed in thought. Cause to be absorbed in thought. Perplexed. Confused. Nonplussed.
Wait. Nonplussed? Doesn't that mean the opposite of confused? Doesn't it mean unperturbed, or unfazed? Again, the word looks like it should mean that. It looks like it should mean not plussed. The problem is that plussed isn't an accepted word. Nonplussed derives from the Latin non plus meaning not more, originally referring to a state in which no more can be said or done.
The alternate definitions of words like bemused and nonplussed have been adopted by so many people that they have even wriggled their way into most dictionaries. As such, many writers simply abandon their use altogether just to avoid the confusion. Hey, if you can’t beat ’em . . . .
Another neologism that gets a lot of press is the word irregardless. Now, before anyone gets their panties in a bunch and shouts that irregardless isn’t a word, allow me to knock you upside the head. It is a word, is used regularly, and as a synonym for regardless. Recently, a friend of mine related this lovely anecdote on the subject:
A friend once asked me if I believed in God. I said that no, I did not. However, I added that I do believe God exists. My friend asked me to explain. I said if there is one person, at least one single person on this earth that believes there is a God, then God exists whether I believe or not. The same with “irregardless.”
I love it. It’s up there with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s famous quote: “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
In any case, irregardless is included as a word under its own heading and with its own definition in all of the major dictionaries—Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, even the Oxford English Dictionary. All have the good taste to label it “nonstandard,” and the OED provides the explanation that “the negative prefix ir- merely duplicates the suffix -less, and is unnecessary.” Merriam-Webster offers this helpful etymological tidbit:
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.
Yes, please. Use regardless instead.
Still, this brings up a troubling issue some people have with language: the fact that it evolves. Language is not (nor should it be) static, preserved in amber. It lives and breathes and changes. It is like water: often lovely and flowing, but sometimes insidious and destructive (and here I’m thinking specifically of the hidden, years-long drip down my kitchen wall that finally worked its way through and caused the wall to collapse).
This latter example is not a perfect analogy, since the destruction of language is not caused by language itself, but by usage. By people, in other words. People are lazy and often unconcerned with rules and details as long as whatever word they concoct gets the job done and everybody knows what they mean. Why should language be any different from everything else we humans soil with our grubby fingerprints? We created it, we should be able to change it whenever we like, right?
Well, right or not, that’s exactly what we do, and have done for thousands of years. English is chock full of words whose spellings, pronunciations, or meanings have changed over the years.
One of my favorites is naughty. In its earliest incarnation, it meant you had naught or nothing. At some point it came to mean you were vicious in moral character (you wicked thing you). The years have softened it to mean simply disobedient or mischievous, usually as applied to children (and some consenting adults).
The word ironic—a word or phrase that suggests a meaning opposite to the literal meaning—has undergone its own metamorphosis over the years. It has come to be synonymous with coincidental, and this misuse was immortalized in Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic,” whose examples were not. Sorry, girl, a traffic jam when you’re already late is a coincidence. A death row pardon two minutes too late is just bad luck.
What is ironic is that her song probably helped the alternate definition make its way into many dictionaries. (Alanis has since redeemed herself in my view with a funny, self-referential update of the lyrics: https://youtu.be/6GVJpOmaDyU)
And then there are those words whose meanings have survived relatively intact, but whose spellings and pronunciations have not. In Old English, bird was spelled bryd or brid. It achieved its modern spelling sometime in the 15th century, due to a linguistic phenomenon known as metathesis, which is the transposition of sounds or letters in a word.
Metathesis happens rather more often than one might suppose. Horse was once hros. Third was thrid. Beorht became bryht, which eventually became bright. Even common speech today contains examples: aks, as an alternative spelling and pronunciation of ask, and nucular for nuclear.
Actually, a variant of aks, spelled ax, dates back to as early as 1500. According to Wikipedia, Chaucer, Caxton, and the Coverdale Bible use ax in this context. As for nucular, well, the pronunciation, if not the spelling, was preferred by two former presidents! (I’ll let you research which ones.)
So, despite our attempts at control, language is an evolving, messy affair. It allows such gorgeous words as dusk, liminal, and serendipity, along with clunkers, like pulchritude (which means, unbelievably, beauty), phlegm, and obstreperous. It gives us idiotic phrases, like very unique (unique means one-of-a-kind, so there can’t be degrees of uniqueness), or think outside the box (an expression so stale that using it isn’t very outside-the-box thinking). Language has all kinds of rules and regulations, which folks routinely disregard, and so we end up with abominations like irregardless.
Yeah, irregardless. It’s a word whether we like it or not. However, I’ve come up with a way to give it some measure of redemption. Leave the word as is, but start a grassroots movement to push its meaning away from a synonym of regardless and toward what its grammatical structure is dying to make it.
To do that, let’s break it down into its constituent parts:
ir- (not) + regard (kindly feeling) + -less (without) = not without kindly feeling
not without = with
Therefore:
irregardless = with kindly feeling
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Irregardless,
Andrew
