Ain’t Ain’t a Word, Disirregardless

English is a funny thing. If we’re being honest, and we should be, it’s all wrong. It’s a mongrel language. A stitched-together mess of Germanic roots, Norman French, Latin, Greek, borrowed slang, butchered spellings, and whatever happened to sound useful at the time. It wasn’t carefully designed; it was invaded, traded, misheard, shortened, and shrugged into existence.

And yet, somehow, this bastard tongue has become the default language of the modern world. Aviation uses it. International business uses it. Science and technology use it. Diplomacy uses it, often between people for whom English is nobody’s first language. A chaotic, inconsistent, rule-breaking language now runs the planet’s most precise systems, which should tell us something.

I’m not a grammar snob. I frequently speak (and sometimes write) “wrong.” As a result, my “grammar snob” friends will correct me. Sometimes viciously. I don’t want to be a hypocrite, so I don’t correct people in conversation, and I don’t believe language needs to be “protected” from the people who actually use it.

That said, there are words and phrases I can’t stand. I don’t use them myself. I don’t like the way they sound or what they flatten or how they feel in my mouth. Reluctantly, I accept them anyway, because English is a living language, not a museum exhibit. Languages grow and change. They shed rules, pick up bad habits, and keep moving.

Still… sometimes I like to use wrong words on purpose. Not out of ignorance. Out of mischief.

One word in my personal arsenal, one that irritates even the most casual grammarian, is disirregardless.

I know it’s wrong. It’s wickedly wrong, and that’s the appeal. Irregardless just isn’t wrong enough for me. It’s been around too long. It’s in dictionaries now, usually with a sigh and an asterisk. It doesn’t get the reaction it used to. Grammar purists have already fought that war and mostly lost.

But disirregardless? That still makes people sit up straight. Maybe it’s like the old “marijuana leads to crack” argument. Irregardless is the gateway drug. Disirregardless is my crack.

This inevitably leads to the whole debate about “right” and “wrong” language. The truth is, there are a lot of words we now accept without thinking. Once, they were considered lazy, vulgar, or outright incorrect. They didn’t become normal because authorities approved them; they became normal because people wouldn’t stop using them. Ain’t I right?

Sometimes words survive because they’re efficient. Sometimes because they’re expressive. Sometimes because they fill a gap no “proper” word quite fits.

A perfect example is meh. Popularized by The Simpsons, meh is barely even a word. It’s practically a caveman grunt. One syllable that means: this is boring; I don’t care; please move on. No elegant substitute does the job as well. Once you hear it, you immediately understand it. And once enough people understood it, dictionaries followed along and pretended they’d always been fine with it.

And this is how language actually works. Sometimes a “wrong” word exists simply because the “right” one doesn’t convey the feeling sharply enough, and correctness loses. Sometimes to usefulness, and sometimes to humor. No matter how correctness loses, it’s always to the irritation of purists.

Sure, disirregardless is wrong now. Start using it anyway. It might just become alright, disirregardless of what grammar snobs think. And if not? Well, we can still get some grammarians' knickers in a bunch.