Why would you ever say “irregardless”?

This has been a pet peeve of mine and somebody requested a post on it, so here it is.

Save your breath and just drop the “ir”. “Irregardless” is not a word, and if it were a word, pretty much everybody that uses it would be using it incorrectly. “Irregardless of the stench, I will eat that raw meat that has been sitting out for five days.” “Irregardless of the danger, I would gladly take a yacht trip off the coast of Somalia.” In these cases, the speaker uses the non-word “irregardless” when he or she means “despite” or “regardless”. I understand that there are some double negatives and it can get confusing, so let’s just take a close, step-by-step look.

We’ll start with the root word “regard”. According to. The verb form is from the Anglo-French, meaning “to look back at”. Broken down into the literal translation, we get the following. “Re” means “back”, as in “Reverse (turn back) course” or “She was disgusted by his rehair (back hair), and told him to shave it.” “Guard” means “to look”, as in “Kevin Costner was in that sexy movie, The Bodyguard (one who looks at a body)”. Regard = look back. It’s not a huge leap to see how this verb form is connected to the noun form, which Merriam-Webster defines as “an aspect to be taken into consideration”.

Now, let’s add the “less”, which means “without”. Think of the statement “I must be brainless if I use irregardless”, which also serves as a mnemonic device. This results in “regardless” meaning “without regard for” or “without looking back at” or “without taking into consideration”. This word makes sense when used in “Regardless of the stench, I will eat that raw meat that has been sitting out for five days”. In this case, you only look less than intelligent because you are eating rancid meat but not because you are using a non-existent word. You have clearly conveyed your point. Congrats!

Finally, let’s add “ir” to the non-word “irregardless”. In Spanish, “ir” is a verb meaning “to go”. Unfortunately, in English or Latin as a prefix, it means “not”. This results in the logical conclusion that “irregardless” means “not without regard for” or more simply “with regard for”. For you math-inclined people, it looks like the following: “irregardless” = (a negative) x “regard” x (a negative) = (positive) x “regard” =  “to look back at”. “Irregardless” would, if it were a word, mean that a fact or statement is taken into consideration.

So, regardless where you picked it up, “irregardless” is probably not the non-word you want.