Give my regards, irregardless

 Facebook's Captain Grammar Pants laid down the law this week: "Irregardless is a double negative, and we all know that we can’t not never, no way, no how, use a double negative. You mean 'regardless.' If you use 'irregardless,' regardless of the consequences, you might not get that job interview. Please be aware that certain dictionaries that SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS have given up the fight and now accept 'irregardless' as a synonym of regardless. I do not! Stem the tide of ignorance and use the correct word, regardless!"

This post predictably brought out the peververein in force to chime in and offer additional crotchets. Whinge as you like, but English is, and continues to be, what we, its speakers and writers, collectively make it over time, and we made irregardless  a word some time ago, as I posted out in a post five years ago: 

Irregardless is too a word; you just don't understand dictionaries

While off for the holiday yesterday, I witnessed a spasm of dictionary panic online, after someone discovered that Merriam-Webster includes irregardless in its dictionaries.

Responses varied: [Gasp] [Clutch pearls] [Recline on chaise longue, applying cold cloths to forehead], accompanied by sentiments such as “Not a word,” “English is Over,” and “The worrrrrld is coming to an end.”

Let’s unpack the misapprehensions crowding together here.

Take “not a word” first. Irregardless is by any measure a word. It has a spelling and a pronunciation. It has a meaning, “regardless.” (Not unusual for English to have more than one word for the same meaning.) It has an etymology, a combination of regardless and irrespective. It has a history, surfacing in the United States circa 1900, with multiple citations since.

When people say that irregardless is “not a word,” then, they can’t mean it literally. What they mean is that it is not a word in use in standard English (which Merriam-Webster points out with the note “nonstandard”).

So we arrive at our second misapprehension, that standard English is the One, True English, all other dialects being inferior, subliterate, nasty. But there is no English Academy (laus Deo) to determine what is “correct” or “proper” English, which is instead the most democratic thing we have. Dialects bobble up against one another, and you get to choose from them whatever suits your purpose.

Let’s look at wicked Merriam-Webster, which had the temerity to include this word. Someone inquired whether any other dictionary does so. I reach over to the shelf adjacent to my desk and find irregardless in the American Heritage Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, and Webster’s New World College Dictionary. All of them, like Merriam-Webster, label the word as “nonstandard” or “informal.”

And they all have some sort of usage note appended to the entry, of which American Heritage offers the most comprehensive: “Irregardless is a word that many people believe to be correct in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. The word was coined in the United States in the early 1900s, probably from a blend of irrespective and regardless. Many critics have complained that it is a redundancy, the negative prefix ir- duplicating the negativity of the –less suffix. Perhaps its reputation as a blend of ill-fitting parts has caused some to insist that it is a “nonword,” a charge they would not think of leveling at a nonstandard word with a longer history, such as ain’t. It is undoubtedly a word in the broader sense of the language, but it has never been accepted in standard English and is almost always changed by copyeditors to regardless.”

(My copy of American Heritage is the fifth edition, from 2011, and it is already beginning to look a little quaint, with its assumption that there are still copy editors.)

Now we arrive at our final misapprehension: what dictionaries are for and how they operate. Just as there is no English Academy dictating correctness, lexicographers are not the club membership committee, deciding what gets in and what gets blackballed. Inclusion in a dictionary does not amount to an imprimatur. Dictionaries exist to tell you what you might want to know about words, both standard and nonstandard: how they are spelled and pronounced, what they mean, where they came from, who uses them. That’s it.

Yesterday’s online kerfuffle was an echo of the brouhaha from half a century ago, when Webster’s Third came out with neutral rather than judgmental notes and was taken to endorse ain’t. Dwight Macdonald had a major hissy fit in the pages of The New Yorker, and the whole clamor is described in David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t.

Now, perhaps you could take a deep, cleansing breath.

The Old editor glares at AI

 A while back I shared a post, then deleted it after I was persuaded that the image in it had been generated by AI. I do not trust AI and do not consciously use it, for the following reasons. And because I am posting this online, I am confident that some generous soul will point out how misinformed I am. 

AI depends on accumulating a vast store of texts from which to generate material. Some of that text is copyrighted, and my understanding is that the copyright holders are neither cited nor compensated. 

The ability to generate new texts from this store makes both plagiarism and fabrication easy, leaving the reader with the task of identifying what can be trusted. We've seen accounts of teachers who cannot vouch for the authenticity of the work their students submit, as well as of legal filings that include bogus citations. (In a proper society, this phenomenon would mean more work for editors to ferret out the genuine from the dross, but few care enough about accuracy to engage editors.) 

AI requires enormous quantities of electricity for its servers, which leads to increases in cost for ordinary consumers and strain on the power grid. It also requires huge quantities of water to cool those servers, which makes it environmentally questionable.

I am beginning to see articles questioning the sustainability of the project: millions invested in  technology that is made obsolete by further technical advances before the initial investment is recouped. This could, these articles warn, lead to a financial collapse comparable to the housing bubble and subprime mortgage collapse of 2008. 

So, yes, I am not a cheerleader. 

 

To the students

 Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, from which I graduated in 1969, has announced on Facebook that it is looking for guest speakers "passionate about their careers" who would be willing to "invest in students' futures for the 2025-2026 school year during school hours." One of the categories for speakers is journalism. 

Well, I am elderly, in Baltimore, and disinclined to drive there to talk for twenty minutes or so, but Fleming County did prepare me for a career of more than forty-five years in journalism, and I know a few things from which those students might benefit. 

I am writing this for the chance that a high school student might look at it. If you are a jaded sophisticate, you might want to read somewhere else. 

The first thing to be passionate about is reading. I was starved for books in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the library was established and when the school libraries were skimpy. I read comic books. I read history, biography, science fiction, everything I could get my hands on. And I kept on reading. Wide reading is the foundation of work in writing, how you know what works and what doesn't; and for an editor it is not possible to know too much about many subjects. 

Even before that wide reading, I picked up standard English grammar quickly in class. Yes, I was a teacher's pet and obnoxiously officious, but if you want a career that involves writing, you have to know and use the standard English dialect. Savor and speak in all the Englishes you encounter and like--there is nothing wrong with that. But mastering standard English grammar and usage is your entry point to the profession. 

When I was a junior in high school, Lowell Denton, the publisher of the Flemingsburg Gazette, invited me to work there in the summers. His wife, Jean, liked to take the summer off, and so I worked as reporter, columnist, and copy editor for six summers in high school and college. This was invaluable experience. Writing and editing are a craft; you learn them by doing them. If someone gives you a chance to learn it as you go along and make your mistakes early, do not pass it up. 

In college and graduate school I majored in English. Once again, the reading: different authors at different times in different genres, seeing how they stretched the language, seeing how they put things together in different structures, talking about books and authors with knowledgeable friends. 

Abandoning a misguided plan to become a Ph.D. in English literature, I by chance landed a job on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer and there through working with helpful and knowledgeable colleagues, I learned to be a copy editor. It's a craft that you learn by doing, remember? That in turn led to a thirty-four-year career at The Baltimore Sun during which I oversaw the copy desk and a retirement gig as an editor for The Baltimore Banner. 

So thanks to Frances Dorsey in the fourth grade and Lynda McKee in high school, to Lowell and Jean Denton, and to colleagues in Cincinnati and Baltimore and nationally who saw some prospect of ability in me, I have had the satisfaction of doing the work I was meant to do. I hope that you will discover as fortunate an outcome. 

What we have lost

The tone in newspapers, when I started out as a copy editor forty years ago, was that the copy desk was a place where reporters fetched  up after their legs or livers gave out, or a domain of quibblers obsessed with minuscule details--comma jockeys. 

Well, I do like to see a verb agree with its subject, and I can punctuate with the precision of a marksman. But the key thing, the fundamental thing about the traditional copy desk, is that it was set apart. It was not connected with the desks that generated stories, and it played no part in their processes. Instead, it was independent, and its members looked fresh at each story, much like a reader. 

Reporters work with their editors on stories, on which they come to an understanding of what should be in them and how the material should be treated. The back-and-forth between editors and reporters carries an inherent hazard of developing groupthink. The copy editor, traditionally understood, has not been a part of groupthink and can raise questions of importance about the focus, tone, and structure of the story. 

That gives, as former Baltimore Sun publisher Mike Waller once said, the opportunity to raise the most important question that a copy editor can ever articulate: Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure?"

On one occasion, a story came to the Sun's copy desk from a department head in which our copy editors identified not only an incoherent structure but a set of passages that could have constituted outright libel, and we defused it, to the publisher's subsequent gratitude. (I used a version of this story, with substitutions for all proper nouns, for years in my editing class at Loyola Maryland, and it never failed to leave the students agog. "You were going to publish this?) 

But as the newspaper business declined, the sharp-pencil people determined that copy editors were an expensive frill. The Sun's last copy editor departed in 2019, and some years ago The New York Times, once famed for its copy editing, disbanded its copy desks and assigned survivors to the respective originating desks, where they can resist groupthink, or perhaps not. 

We once had a model, and it served the reader well.