Irregardless

Feb 15, 2012 20:23

"Irregardless" is such an empty word. "Regardless" just means "in spite of," but what does that make "irregardless" mean? It means nothing, then. There is no contrasting point that is in spite of something. There's just no issue.

It was cold. Regardless, the paradegoers eagerly waited in the streets.
In spite of it being cold [regardless] the paradegoers eagerly waited in the streets.

It was cold. Irregardless, the paradegoers eagerly waited in the streets.
The paradegoers eagerly waited in the streets in spite of nothing [irregardless].

XD It's not even a word in the dictionary.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that my genius professor used this word. I'm not detracting from her brilliance at all -- she's truly a genius, brilliant -- but she was really incensed about the topic she was lecturing about (overdiagnosis of "autism" for kids who don't have it) and she was on a roll.

She had other winsome quotes tonight too. I love her. This is the same professor who said "Sparkly unicorns work very hard at eating play-doh" to prove a point, which effectively did so.

"Zero. Zilcho. Nada" (about how age-equivalent scores tell you nothing about a child's level of functioning but are just some empty statistic of the median score of a particular age group of the norming sample)

"Oh my god, disorder from cat litter. Another reason not to have cats!" (talking about cytomegalovirus, which is actually quite terrifying and the reason pregnant women are not allowed to change cat litter)

"So this brings me to a point about my husband's family" (talking about how his sister in law made everyone take off their shoes in their house, because their house had a crawling baby who would put things on the floor in her mouth and shoes can track in nasty things like toxins that can affect development)

"I don't know if it's a 'sexy speech disorder' or what...." (talking about how the diagnosis of "childhood apraxia of speech" is overused when people can't or don't take the time to really figure out why a child doesn't talk or talk typically)

brain, school, funny, real life, cats

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