I recall my mum, it must have been in the 1980's, engaging in much eye-rolling and tut-tutting at our (Australia) then prime minister, Bob Hawke, using the word 'irregardless'. Bob was ostensibly quite charismatic, but no one could accuse him of being an especially thoughtful communicator.
In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt a word that sounds sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire , and assume it's sufficiently cromulent for formal use. (A very recent thread on HN was around the use of the word 'decimate' as an alternative spelling for 'destroy', for similar reasons.)
I think Boris Johnson is a profoundly bad force in the universe, but I do recall feeling the editing of one of his appearances on a UK TV show (Have I Got News For You) was patently unfair, as he was asserting that calling small four wheeled vehicles 'quad-bikes' was etymologically unsound. His point (I imagine - the broadcast did not include the justification) was that 'bike' is a corruption of bicycle, in turn rooted from 'bi', referring to the two wheels.
> In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt a word that sounds sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire
This seems an excessively negative take on it.
How do we learn new words? Sure, we COULD look up the definitions, but (1) who bothers, and (2) we have plenty of evidence that definitions are so vague as to be useless. (I recall arguing with my high school english teacher about "moot", which we had as aa vocab word with a definition that didn't match my colloquial understanding).
So as adults, as teens, tweens, and before, most of our language is learned from contextual usage. Which is a terrible way to maintain accuracy. When I get stumped with newer terminology, my friends that USE the new words are often at a loss to explain them (one spent 30 mins trying to explain "kappa") because they don't know a formal definition, they know it when they see it.
We can be smug and superior about the "less literate" trying to be impressive, but honestly, that applies to all of us, we are just mocking those that get caught.
Yes, I concede it's a bit of a bugbear - apologies for the negativity.
The idea that not spending the requisite minute or so to look up meaning and usage of a new word is acceptable behaviour of adults seems depressingly defeatist. We don't consider this an acceptable attitude during a child's dozen or more years of formal education, and realistically most adults have easy & rapid access to authoritative sources.
That our languages should then be (re)defined by these torpid users -- well that's just a horrible deal.
It's particularly ironic to trying to make usage of 'irregardless' seem like reaching for unearned language skills since it is a real word, being several hundred years old. You could benefit from looking into the actual standing of this word - is it possible that you're the one who's reaching?
There's plenty of words from several hundred years ago that are no longer considered part of current language(s). In any case, I don't believe Bob was uttering the word out of a charming fondness for etymological anachronisms, so much as pretentious ignorance.
The claim was made that common usage defines meaning (I don't entirely agree), and that the masses had spoken, as it were, and determined that decimate no longer has any notion of 1/10th of something being removed, but rather the word's meaning is now functionally identical to destroy or devastate (I don't agree with this either).
My point is/was that if that claim is true, then the choice of which word to use is purely one of aesthetics rather than exercising any nuance of meaning or intent -- a regrettably poor evolution for a language.
In retrospect it's fairly typical behaviour for less literate types to adopt a word that sounds sophisticated beyond their standard repertoire , and assume it's sufficiently cromulent for formal use. (A very recent thread on HN was around the use of the word 'decimate' as an alternative spelling for 'destroy', for similar reasons.)
I think Boris Johnson is a profoundly bad force in the universe, but I do recall feeling the editing of one of his appearances on a UK TV show (Have I Got News For You) was patently unfair, as he was asserting that calling small four wheeled vehicles 'quad-bikes' was etymologically unsound. His point (I imagine - the broadcast did not include the justification) was that 'bike' is a corruption of bicycle, in turn rooted from 'bi', referring to the two wheels.