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.
The popularity of the word “irregardless” demonstrates a property of human thought and socialization that’s very important to most people here: that the majority of people (at least those that speak English) are perfectly happy copying other people’s behavior without asking why. More complex examples of this come from studies where people struggle to communicate the difference between Boolean operators (specifically OR and XOR.)
My point is that this is a reminder of why we have software engineers and why cheap contractors, AI, and easier to use tooling (such as “graphical programming languages) haven’t been able to replace them: people think and speak too imprecisely to communicate even just software specifications correctly let alone implement them.
I was a political philosophy major in college - it's interesting seeing how important being able to rigorously define what you're saying, and taking into account what your statements assume, is critically important for both engineering, and philosophy.
...also it turns out that dissecting a statement and pointing out the inconsistentsies is a great way to piss people off.
it's precisely the formal logic, albeit mostly in legal, that employs double negation to cover all bases, in case of doubt about the excluded middle, and importantly, to reverse liability of proof.
You are not not an idiot. I didn't say you were one, but I will leave the proof to the opposite to somebody else.
It might just be an intensifier, irregardless of the legalese, whenever it defaults to the law of excluded middle, that is, perhaps when the proof is not even considered relevant, whereas "regardless" implicitly connotes neglect.
Regardless ofyou being an idiot.
or Irregardless of you being perhaps an idiot.
Alas, double negation tends to be not very stable in informal speach, e.g. any "some", not any "none", not not any: "some", "any" or "all". This involves type coercion from the gradual to the binary interpretation (and it's terribly difficult to make explicit, exactly not trivially simple at least).
Indeed. If we didn't slavishly imitate the language of people around us, we'd have no languages at all. Even as things are, it takes a decade and a half for most people to master their own tongue.
The author seems to claim that `irregardless' is all right and
that caring about it is caring too much and vain. He compares
it to other malformed words such as `television' and
`flammable'. But there seems to be a significant difference
between these and that. While recognizing the malformedness of
these words require knowledge of Greek and Latin, recognizing
that of `irregardless' is trivial for anyone who is proficient
in current English: it is obviously a stupid word, and that
makes it stupider.
> it is obviously a stupid word, and that makes it stupider.
This is the social signaling aspect of language at work, not the communication part.
Human brains can trivially digest the correct meaning of “irregardless”. Using the word, however, marks someone as not having had a “proper” education, and would perhaps brand the speaker as “stupid”, “irregardless” of whether the idea they were expressing was intelligent or not.
> Human brains can trivially digest the correct meaning of “irregardless”.
It can also understand the meaning of "iregardles", "ireggardless" and "irregardlless". Is that really
a sufficient condition for the word to be considered correct?
You'll find that people, even those without formal education in English like me, don't generally write like that. I think just reading and writing a lot makes one's spelling naturally converge to the most common one.
Except if you are actually well-educated then you would know that “irregardless” is widely used to mean the same thing as “regardless” and thus to use it as such would not be a sign of a lack of education.
Pure conjecture on my part: irregardless is an intensifier of dismissal. It allows the word to start with a vowel. Since (American) English requires exhortations to start with a consonant, it forces the speaker to begin the sound with a glottal stop. Initial glottal stops are markers for interjective cursing, like “‘Asshole!”
The conjecture is likely wrong. Some speakers simply reach for irregardless whenever they want to say "without regard" and are never heard using regardless.
> it is obviously a stupid word, and that makes it stupider.
One might argue that 'stupid' was originally intended to describe a person of low intelligence and because words aren't sentient, it's a misuse of the word.
Even though I know the correct meanings, no matter how hard I try the word “flammable” sounds to me like “able to flame” while “inflammable” sounds like “incapable of flame”.
English is beautiful. I say that as an ESL who speaks Spanish and Italian fluently.
English spelling, and etymology are fascinating and closely related. English spelling often retains the original spelling despite changes in pronunciation.
Inflammable come directly from the Latin where “in” is not a negation but putting something “in” a state of being, in this case flame.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Thus I have no business telling you whether you are wrong or not in your assertion.
However, both its grammar and spelling is incredibly ad-hoc. To someone who is a fan of structure (such as a programmer like myself), this is frustrating. I was going to make a comparison to a programming language, but I came to the conclusion that there isn't really a programming language out there that absorbs everything without making it natural in the adopted framework.
Like you, I learned English as a second language and even though I can speak it reasonably well, I'm constantly annoyed by its idiosyncrasies.
Inflammable means able to be put “in flames”. But most people read “in-“ in this case as a negation, and therefore assume it’s the opposite.
So “flammable” is born and people start using it and thinking the original form is opposite.
But inflammable materials are dangerous to treat otherwise! Since no one confuses “flammable” for inert, for safety reasons, the word “flammable” is used when labeling inflammable material.
The Simpsons made a joke about it once with Dr. Nik.
My favorite/worst example of language evolution is the word factoid. Factoid literally meant a thing resembling a fact (i.e. a false fact) which is believed to be true after being repeated in print. Now, those same writers who where presumably spreading factoids, have inverted its meaning to be 'a minor, but true fact' [0].
I always thought “meteoroid” was an odd term. It’s something like a meteor, except it hasn’t entered the atmosphere. It’s like calling a slice of bread a toastoid.
English evolves because it is polycentric. Other languages are held back by formal regulators from evolving (e.g. Association of Spanish Language Academies, Académie française, Council for German Orthography, China's State Language Work Committee, etc.)
I feel the evolution of language reflects important details about the culture wielding it.
I think a strong example is the word 'cult'. It once referred to a small sect or faith - and that's all. Leaders of established sects so often demonized small, competing faiths that cult became redefined to refer to evil and dangerous groups of worshipers. Notably, no other word ever emerged to take it's place.
I really wanted a tool to evidence how changes in language reflected changes in society's beliefs. I figured an authoritarian source of English definitions would be that tool but there isn't any such thing.*
In the end I had to adopt the more difficult approach of finding examples that my audience could relate with.
* (For a time I believed that the Oxford English Dictionary was that source, due to the 60-odd years between the 1st and 2nd editions. I didn't realize tho that supplements were added on an ongoing basis.)
The actress Jamie Lee Curtis complained about MW's addition of "irregardless" because she misunderstands the purpose of that dictionary: to document and describe actual language usage. Therefore, if "irregardless" is in wide common usage, it gets added as an entry.
I guess I'd just assume she had a prescriptive personality type and preferred the dictionary she happened to look at to have the same view of language.
Your post is pretty fair and I don't have an issue with it but I do have an argument (albeit not a very convincing one) for why somebody might take issue with a word like irregardless. I'm sure we've all experienced the frustration in an argument where somebody will point to a less comprehensive dictionary that doesn't document your particular or explicit usage of a term and use that to say you're wrong, but the opposite is occasionally true where people will take popular usage or a dictionary entry of a term that might be incorrect or used in a way that is incorrect and use that to justify their continued usage of the term. The former is frustrating because both parties may understand and come to terms with each other but one is shirking their responsibilities in an argument, the latter can be frustrating because there may be a genuine difficulty in communication until the common usage or dictionary is brought out to clear up the confusion.
There's a strong case to be made that the purpose of a dictionary is to aid communication by describing the usage of words so I think it's clear that 'irregardless' deserves a mention although with a warning on usage, which seems to be the case here with Merriam-Webster describing it as non-standard and the OED going a step further and saying it's not correct. Language prescriptivists usually deserve the lectures on the usefulness of descriptive dictionaries that they get but I don't think that it's always useful to go to the extreme and celebrate confusing or commonly understood as incorrect usage of words despite some minor usage. The article brings up a good word that was changed over confusion which was inflammable becoming flammable as the 'in' suffix could be taken to meaning a negator and I don't think anybody really had an issue with this, although it does say that 'flammable' is malformed but I really don't see how.
Merriam-Webster labels the word as "nonstandard" and recommends that regardless be used, all the while assuring readers that "irregardless" is indeed a word that has been in use by English speakers for "well over 200 years" and by "a large number of people across a wide geographic range and with a consistent meaning".
And, note, that same dictionary makes no disparaging remarks about the abuse of "literally" as a generic intensifier; it simply cites that usage as one of the meanings. The abuse of "literally" is more recent than "irregardless".
That tells you that "irregardless" is quite the lexical pariah. A major dictionary like Merriam is not able to wholeheartedly accept it in spite of the word's age and stability.
I strongly suspect that a new class of abuse is recent.
literally is actually reasonable as an intensifer for a figurative situation. I.e. the speaker is asking you to forget that you're just using an extreme figure of speech for a situation that is actually mild, but instead imagine it literally happening. I.e. the situation I'm describing is in fact so intense, that please pay attention to the figure of speech, since it is utterly fitting.
What we have now is literally just being applied randomly where there is no figure of speech, or not even a plausible figure of speech, as in:
> I literally just moved here from New York last week; do you know where I can get a decent bagel?
Here, "literally" doesn't inform us that a plausible metaphor is actual ("moved here from New York" is not a common figure of speech with a special meaning, and is vanishingly unlikely to be interpreted as such), and doesn't ask us to get a more intense sense of a metaphor by imagining it as actually happening: the move actually happened, that's all.
One of the chief functions of a mainstream dictionary is to guide users on usage. Irregardless of the principles possessed by Merriam-Webster's editors, they still have to warn readers when a usage will be conspicuous. Chumming the water for pedants can only be a distraction.
"""(It's regardless, Caroline, not irregardless," Lorena said gently. Caroline huffily replied that regardless was a footless, weak word and got you nowhere, that on the other hand you threw in the word irregardless and won any argument hands down."""
It's scarcely surprising that it's not used in print. Books are considered, written by those most proficient in English, read and re-read, and professionally proof-read.
The extent of its use in ordinary conversation is something else entirely.
paywall (didn't read). I had a co-worker who used to use irregardless. I didn't say anything. My own personal pet-peeve is the phrase "that begs the question...", and then the speaker raises a question. No. That's not begging the question. sigh.
At this point in "post post-modernism"? I guess my line in the sand is pronunciation of proper nouns. Cue the "gif" vs "jif" debate.
I think the difference is the intent. If the intent of the act is the death (or other outcome) of a group of individuals then the act would be mass murder. If however the intent of the act is to use these acts to cause terror (the deaths are merely a means to that end) then the act is terrorism.
Terror has been a tool of a number of political groups over the years. An easy example would be when the IRA bombing campaign moved outside of London after the ring of steel was constructed. The destruction of property, or the deaths of individuals themselves in London weren't the aims, it was the threat/fear/terror that anyone could become a victim. The terror was a lever to force government response.
However, would you for example include propaganda, which is specifically designed to spread fear? I always associated terrorism with physical violence.
> However, would you for example include propaganda, which is specifically designed to spread fear? I always associated terrorism with physical violence.
Propaganda in the form of "$OUTGROUP are all murderers and rapists" is just fearmongering rather than terrorism, propaganda that threatens violence directly (eg. "Kill all $OUTGROUP") might be considered such, esp. if there is any reason to think that the propaganda is at all likely to be acted upon (so, if $OUTGROUP is "clowns" I don't think it would currently qualify, but "banksters" might).
Randomly killing people for non-political reasons, such as done by some mass shooters or serial killers, is not terrorism, even if in some cases it kills more people than many acts of terrorism do.
I suppose the word political could encompass this, but it should also be pointed out it is political in the sense of having an intended purpose for societal change. That goes beyond what most people consider politics. It could be religious, ethnocentric, ideological, philosophical, etc. Even the actions of the luddites could fall under terrorism.
> it should also be pointed out it is political in the sense of having an intended purpose for societal change
The Christchurch mosque shooting was very consciously political - the perpetrator published a manifesto, he pre-announced and live streamed his crime to an online political discussion community dominated by the far right, he was hoping to inspire copycats through which to change society (he hoped to trigger the genocide of the Muslim minority in Western societies). Compare that to the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting - in the later case, the perpetrator didn’t prepare a manifesto. His motivations appeared to be primarily personal. Like everyone, he had some political views which investigators pieced together from writings and communications he left behind, but he made no attempt to communicate a clear political justification for his monstrous act.
Both shootings were horrific acts of evil. But only one was clearly intended as political. Only one was a clear case of terrorism
I'm in full agreement. I'm just saying that a lot of people have a very narrow definition of political, and can easily fall into the trap of seeing that definition being a left vs right thing, or whatever political lense they tend to bias towards. For example, while the Sandy Hook shooting was distinctly personal in motivation, the 2014 Isla Vista shooting looked very similar but was very political, and thus terroristic. It just happens that the political motivation was one not commonly viewed as being political.
No, not according to a reasonable definition of terrorism. It's terrorism if a group is intentionally attacking civilians (non-combatants) for political goals. Freedom fighters may or may not be terrorists, depending on whether they intentionally attack civilians or only hit military targets. What it means to intentionally attack someone is regulated by the Doctrine of Double Effect, is based on distinguishing between side effects and intentional goals of an action. It's a tricky topic and there is leeway for interpretation, but It's not as if a definition in this area could or should never lead to controversies.
Unfortunately, this definition is rarely used, because it doesn't match the political goals of states. First, it follows from the definition that there is widespread state terrorism. Second, countries that send military occupation forces to other countries have a vested interest to brand asymmetric warfare against their military as terrorism, but this is not covered by the definition.
I agree, what you describe is what terrorists think. Obviously, at some point in their life they persuade themselves that their political goals justify the intentional killing of innocent civilians. They go at great lengths with these justifications precisely because they are so obviously flawed. Attempts to justify their actions involve a mix of denying the Doctrine of Double Effects, speaking of necessary sacrifices, and of portraying innocent victims as guilty collaborators.
I am a freedom fighter.
You are conducting asymmetric warfare.
They are terrorists.
By the author of I, Claudius:
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer's expedition
Not as a mere reconnaisance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece - they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.
Sure, but I think this meme is actually not so clearly true in practice. Freedom fighters may engage in terrorist acts (see Algeria for example) but that doesn’t seem like a quality of “fighting for freedom”, merely a correlative practice.
Why not? 'terrorists' are by definition people committing terrorism. Any definition of 'terrorismu' whould define a set of terrorists, bud different definitions would lead to different people considered terrorists.
Defining terrorism is not hard - public violence on civilians for ideological (political, religious) reasons. Or more narrow definition that would replace 'civilians' with 'general public' (t exclude attack on state structures).
What you cannot is to hope that any definition of 'terrorism' would include all 'evil' acts and exclude all 'good' acts, because distinction between these is complex.
And freedom fighters are by definition people committing freedom fighting.
>What you cannot is to hope that any definition of 'terrorism' would include all 'evil' acts and exclude all 'good' acts, because distinction between these is complex.
Precisely the problem.
Ceteris paribus, it's 'terrorism' when you think it's 'evil', and it's freedom fighting' when you think it's 'good'.
Two different descriptions of exactly the same facts.
No, problem is to try to assign a moral value to these words, instead of keeping them just descriptive. If you keep just descriptive meaning, you could see that there is not a contradiction between 'terrorism' and 'freedom fighting'.
Some 'terrorism' may be a part of 'freedom fighting', while some not (if the ideological end is different from freedom). And some 'freedom fighting' may be 'terrorism', while some not (if means does not include attacking civilian population, just military structures).
One person may adopt value-laden definitions, another person may adopt value-neutral ones. Arguably, the term “perspectivism” is more appropriate for the former than the later.
The fact that an act occurred, and the question of what its announced motivations are, is not (usually) something that depends on your perspective. People with widely different moral and political views can agree on those descriptive facts even if they make completely opposite value judgements of them.
(Conspiracy theorists sometimes dispute the fact that an attack occurs and the real motivations behind it. But there are plenty of terrorist attacks which they don’t bother doing this to.)
I’m not a linguist, but the main issue here seems to be the desire to make adjectives into nouns, as it’s easier for humans to conceptually understand.
Instead of X is [noun], we could say X is Person who engaged in X [acts.]
I don’t think this is accurate or a charitable interpretation of what I said.
I am making a distinction between actions and nouns. I hold that it is not controversial to say certain actions are considered terroristic actions and certain actions are considered freedom fighting actions. Often, the same people engage in both, and combined with our tendency to want to assign people in noun classes (He is an X), this results in the perceived equivalence you are speaking about.
At some point, you still have to define what the actions are, which is my argument. By actions I mean specific things, not the broad amorphous label of "terrorizing."
As I said, if you narrow it down to specific actions (shooting, bombing, protest, etc.) the distinction between the two seems far more clear. I don't think anyone would claim that killing a crowd of civilians is somehow a freedom-fighting act, even if it is done by someone who mostly engages in freedom-fighting actions.
I mean, you can define words however you want, but as I just said, I have a hard time believing that anyone would categorize "blowing up a bus filled with civilians" as a freedom-fighting act. Are you arguing that some people are justified in saying it is?
The person who blew up the bus and everybody who supports their actions defined it as 'freedom fighting'.
That is how they justified killing civilians to themselves. Casualties of war.
Just a short excursion into recent history: Nelson Mandela was once classified as a terrorist. It's because the ANC was involved in a number of bombings while engaging in 'freedom-fighting'.
The issue isn't what particular actors think to justify their beliefs, but whether society-wide definitions are justified. This is a practical matter.
As I said initially: if you stick to describing actions, rather than intents or consequences, the difficulty of defining things is much easier.
Your example is also illustrating my point perfectly. Under my system, Nelson Mandela would not be a terrorist or a freedom fighter, he would be a man who engaged in both (separately) terroristic acts and freedom-fighting acts. That seems far less controversial of a statement to me.
It seems like you aren't really reading my comments, because as I have said a few times now, this would clearly be an act of terrorism.
If your next question will be, "Is the ANC then a terrorist organization?" I refer you to my previous comment where I said we should avoid labeling nouns, but instead label actions.
You can decide that up is down and left is right, but again, as a practical matter, this is really quite irrelevant. Unless you convince a sizable portion of the population / those with power to agree with you, your aberrant labeling is simply meaningless.
You can, see my definition above. The crucial feature is whether civilians are intentionally targeted or not. You can add all kinds of clauses (e.g. to conveniently exclude military forces of nation states), but that's the morally relevant criterion. A group that is intentionally targeting civilians for political reasons is a terrorist organization.
The issue is that terrorism is about advancing an ideology. That's the important part. It's not about how terrifying the act was, nor is it about the attacker's skin colour (as is rather depressingly hinted at in US discourse).
Ted Bundy terrorised his community, but there was no political aim. He was a sociopath, but not a terrorist.
Anders Behring Breivik terrorised his community, and he had an explicit and clear ideological aim. He's a sociopath, and a terrorist.
So in other words, it's an antonym to "senseless violence": as long as the perpetrator has a known agenda (whether implicitly or explicitly stated), it's terrorism?
Doesn't that also make things like war and police brutality terrorism?
Growing up in the US post-9/11, the word terrorism itself was very political. It was weaponized by successive presidential administrations as a catch-all term for "any person or group the government doesn't like" and repeated endlessly on news broadcasts and in other popular media. Terrorism is our only "justification" for holding people like Ramzi bin al-Shibh without trial for nearly 20 years.
The original meaning of the word was lost long ago in popular American discourse, and the state prefers it that way. We still see that today, as prominent American political figures label peaceful protesters terrorists.
Anyways, thanks for helping me chew through this. I'd never considered the meaning of the word closely before.
> “irregardless: a word that distinguishes people who do not care much about English usage from those who care terribly—and want the world to know it.”
In other words, a sibboleth?
Exercise for hackers: what are the minimal code sequences one can write to distinguish between various x86 versions? various python versions? etc.
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.