Jamie Lee Curtis: “Merriam-Webster just officially recognized ‘irregardless’ as a word”

[stewie_e]

Comments

[mayjailer]

[callonme_84]

Ooh right...now Im wondering if this is why Mariah used it.

[burntxtoashes]

maybe she'll finally be able to make fetch happen!

[my_moloko]

It kills me that people miss that this was a joke!

[chomsky]

Someone should let Jamie Lee Curtis know that the Dictionary does not CREATE or LEGITIMIZE words, it ACKNOWLEDGES words that already exist in our vernacular that most native interlocutors will understand and therefore are already legitimate, IRREGARDLESS of her prescriptivist tendencies!

[chomsky]

I actually see, by taking a split second to read the content of the post, that Merriam-Webster has done this for me already lmao.

Anyway I love dictionaries and dictionary staff.

[mayjailer]

we're talking about the spokesperson for activia here

[chomsky]

idk what's problematic about Activia. Digestive health is important.

[missjersey]

I mean all words are made up.

But if we break down the etymology of "irregardless" it doesn't make sense in the way that people use it.

I will still judge people who think they're geniuses who use it. But not the general public because it's not that big of a deal.

[chomsky]

Most words *aren't* made up, except when a word is coined because a new technology or invention exists that demands it. Words come into being through natural evolution and speakers' tendencies to add morphemes to words, but they're not made up - what legitimizes words in languages is multiple people's ability to understand the word in a discourse, which happens through language evolution.

[missjersey]

Tell that to "yeet"

[chomsky]

Yes, yeet is a neologism. That doesn't disprove the rest of the statement.

[kurenai_tenka]

I did not spend so much effort training myself not to say it for these fuckers to take the easy way out. >:(

[petecarl]

lol, same!

[beysactingcoach]

Things happening in this pestilence of a year now I just have a sense of "hey, that's just 2020"