As part of the Tour for Curtis Honeycutt’s Good Grammar Is the Life of the Party: Tips for a Wildly Successful Life, he was kind enough to supply me with this Guest Post to give us all a little taste of his work. Hope you enjoy. For more about the book and the giveaway, see the Spotlight post I put up a bit ago.
No one likes the word moist. I also find the following words to be particularly icky: cyst, pus, dipthong, dongle, ointment, seepage, yeasty, analgesic, succulent, kumquat, and goiter. There’s even a relatively-new word for the disgust of certain words: logomisia. This word is so new that it’s not in moist—I mean, most—dictionaries. Perhaps the pencil-pushers over at the big dictionary companies have logomisia for the word logomisia.
Speaking of hating certain words, I’m afraid you’re not going to like this.
I love to ask people what their least favorite word is (for the record, mine is supple). By far, according to my informal surveying tactics, the word that gets the most votes is irregardless.
I’m sorry to break it to you, but irregardless is technically a word.
Yes, irregardless is a word. Depending on the word processing tool you use, it sometimes gets the red squiggly underline treatment—but not always. And if you look up irregardless in a dictionary, you’ll find it there along with all of the other officially-sanctioned words.
When people jokingly use irregardless, they are doing it wrong. Those who utter it accompanied by an ironic smirk simply use it instead of regardless, to the frustration of word purists.
Many have dismissed the word irregardless because they view it as redundant; regardless is all we need, they argue. Adding ir- in front of regardless downright irritates people.
But that’s the wrong way to use irregardless. You see, irregardless is a way to drop the mic on an argument after someone has already used regardless. Here’s an example:
Robin: Batman, will you let me pick the music on the Bat Radio next time we’re in the Batmobile? I promise not to sing along.
Batman: Absolutely not. Regardless, your taste in music is terrible.
Robin: Holy supple salamanders, Batman! I won’t play any Creed or Nickelback. Can I pick the music, please?
Batman: Irregardless, my answer is “no.” To the Batcave.
In this scene, Batman shuts down the argument by putting extra emphasis on regardless by saying irregardless. Batman knows how to use irregardless properly. Also, he’s the one who wears the pants in the Dynamic Duo (okay, technically they’re tights, but Robin only wears green underwear).
Most of the time irregardless is used, it’s misused, probably in a knowingly tongue-in-cheek manner. And its intent comes through; people either get bothered by their friend’s usage of irregardless or they think it’s funny. Either way, unless you’re using irregardless like Batman, you’re doing it wrong.
Batman once said “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.” I say: leave the defining up to the dictionary; we can all do a better job of improving our grammar and word usage to make our lives more awesome.
—Curtis Honeycutt is a syndicated humor columnist. He is the author of Good Grammar is the Life of the Party: Tips for a Wildly Successful Life. Find more at curtishoneycutt.com.
