Someone posted on Twitter recently that "'irregardless' is not a proper word." I want to look at what sort of word "proper" is, and who has custody of it, but first we have to sweep "irregardless" out of the way.
"Irregardless" is--and take no backtalk--a word. It has a spelling, a pronunciation, a meaning, and a history, an entry in the dictionary. It means "regardless." The prefix "in-" means "not," as in "inflexible," converting to "ir-" to match the spelling of the root word; it's an intensifier, so "irregardless" means "really, really regardless." It has been around since 1795 or so and is regularly stigmatized as "nonstandard." Use it, and the people concerned about what is "proper" get their backs up.
I know what "proper" is. In the fifth through eighth grades, two formidable women, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, drilled us in the traditional schoolroom grammar. They did not call it "standard English" or "standard written English"; it was English, and everything else, including the way people speak, was improper. I took it all in and became an insufferable prig.
Later in life I became a tinpot despot, overseeing the copy desk at a major American newspaper and supervising more than four dozen copy editors. Occasionally another department head, known to be a martinet who terrified the staff cringing under him, would come to my door, tugging his forelock and craving a boon, to ask me a question about English usage. I would give him a ruling, and he would back away gratefully.
But what I had learned since the eighth grade from linguists and lexicographers is that English is a broad tent, that there are in fact multiple Englishes, each valid in its own context, and that puts the word "proper" up for grabs. What is proper? For whom? For what occasions? And--here is the crucial point--who gets to decide?
Here's what I told my fellow copy editors at The Baltimore Sun and my students over twenty-four years at Loyola University Maryland: Don't think about what is proper; think about what is appropriate. Look at a word, an expression, a metaphor. Is it appropriate for the speaker/writer? For the subject? For the occasion? For the publication? For the reader? You're here to make judgments, I said, informed judgments rising from your reading and your knowledge of the various registers of the language.
There are people, to judge from the peeving commonly found online, who have not got beyond the eighth grade understanding of grammar and usage, and there are, I fear, still people enforcing that stunted pedagogy on their helpless charges. What peeks out from their statements about what is "proper" is the class issue. "I know what is proper, and Those People, the Masses, the Unwashed, do not. I am their superior."
That is the language of the prig, and prig as I once was, I have learned better.