I'm a Neon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

Today I have two segments, one about Irregardless and one about Words from Crime Fiction.

But before we start, I have an AP Style webinar coming up February 28th with Reagan.com.

It's a basic and intermediate level session for people who need to know AP Style for work.

I'll put a link you can use to register in the show notes and there's also a link in my email

newsletter which you can sign up for at quickanddirtytips.com. Let's get started with a listener question.

Hi Grandma Girl, I'm an English teacher in Boston, Massachusetts and I am freaking out.

One of my students tells me that Irregardless is now a word and apparently it's been added to some

dictionaries. Can you clear this up for me? This is serious panic time.

In the immortal words of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, don't panic. Irregardless is a word

but it's not a proper word and your student's assertion that it's in some dictionaries is a great

opportunity to talk about the different kinds of entries in dictionaries. But first, let's talk

about Irregardless. Some people mistakenly use Irregardless when they mean regardless

and that's considered to be an error. Regardless means regardless, without regard or despite

something. For example, squiggly will eat chocolate regardless of the consequences, meaning

squiggly will eat chocolate without regard for the consequences despite the consequences and so on.

The prefix IR is a negative prefix. So if you add the prefix IR to a word that's already

negative, like regardless, you're making a double negative that means literally without without regard.

The first example the Oxford English Dictionary shows for Irregardless is actually from another

dictionary. Harold Wentworth's American dialect dictionary from 1912, which places the origin of the

word in Western Indiana. I also briefly went down a rabbit hole looking at other words from the

American dialect dictionary. They include doodad, dojigger, finagle, fuddy-deady, and nummies to

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