How to correct

[Miss Mae]

I somehow can't believe Prof. Lagman's list of 70 commonly mishandled English idiomatic expressions until I heard my physiotherapist said ‘irregardlesss’ the other day. I was tempted to correct him right then and there, but I realized that I myself commit grammatical mistakes from time to time. I consoled myself thinking that he is a healthcare worker anyway, but he mentioned the word again the next day. How could I correct him without hurting his ego?

[Joe Carillo]

This is my idea of how to correct your physiotherapists’s misuse of “irregardless” without hurting his ego: Get him to read the usage note below of the Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary about the nonstandard status of “irregardless” in the English language.

How to get him to read it? Well, since he’s your physiotherapist, find a way to get him to visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum. If he is web-literate, explain to him that you would like to share with him a resource for improving English usage that you discovered on the web recently. Better still, ask him to specifically click the link to this posting. If this doesn’t make him see the light and avoid using “irregardless” altogether, I don’t know what will.

Good luck!
 

irregardless
Function: adverb
Etymology: probably blend of irrespective and regardless
Date: circa 1912

 nonstandard   : REGARDLESS
usage Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that *there is no such word.* There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.

[Telekinesis]

This is my idea of how to correct your physiotherapists’s misuse of “irregardless” without hurting his ego: Get him to read the usage note below of the Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary about the nonstandard status of “irregardless” in the English language.

How to get him to read it? Well, since he’s your physiotherapist, find a way to get him to visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum. If he is web-literate, explain to him that you would like to share with him a resource for improving English usage that you discovered on the web recently. Better still, ask him to specifically click the link to this posting. If this doesn’t make him see the light and avoid using “irregardless” altogether, I don’t know what will.

Good luck!
 

irregardless
Function: adverb
Etymology: probably blend of irrespective and regardless
Date: circa 1912

 nonstandard   : REGARDLESS
usage Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that *there is no such word.* There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.

Irregardless - to me, the word is a double negative.

[Joe Carillo]

You're absolutely right! "Irregardless" is in the same league as the double-negative constructions "I didn't say nothing" and "You mean you didn't find nothing at all?" These are nonstandard syntactic constructions that contain two negatives but are intended to have a negative meaning. On the contrary, however, the use of the two negatives results in a positive meaning, which makes the construction semantically erroneous.

(The correct equivalents of those two double-negative constructions are, of course, "I didn't say anything" and "You mean you didn't find anything at all?")

[Miss Mae]

It has been five weeks.

I didn't hear him say it again, and I do not know how to correct him out of the blue.

[Signole]

thanks you so much for post)