Pet peeve time: As a linguist, I wish to assure everyone that ‘irregardless’ is a perfectly acceptable word of English. Yes, it means the same thing as ‘regardless’, but after all, people (well, maybe aside from a few stand-up comedians) don’t freak out about the flammable~inflammable pair, so why regardless~irregardless is such a socially marked thing is a bit of a mystery to me.
I find flammable/inflammable confusing. It doesn’t make sense to me. I find irregardless annoying. Taking the word apart it means the opposite of what the speaker intends. In my youth it probably would have been called slang.
To my ear, “irregardless” sounds uneducated.
Inflammable is confusing- I have think of “in flames”, it’s one word that needs to be dropped from usage, especially on tankers on the road. Our language is full of strange words that have evolved over time. I personally can’t conceive of any uneducated person using such long words as irregardless (my computer doesn’t agree that this is a proper word- redlined it, btw- but it also dislikes some other words that are fine). The comment on that word makes me want to find an excuse to use it, and frequently. Read enough literature, especially from different eras and you find yourself using language that is no longer considered “proper” to our ears. Or decide to abandon usage that seems cumbersome or otherwise lacking in sense and someone from a self proclaimed language police will get on your case. I get most annoyed with humanities majors who feel superior but are sorely lacking in any STEM reasoning abilities- we science majors often take in depth humanities electives whereas I never hear of those in humanities delving into a math or science.
Oops- ranting off subject.
Head-scratching moments:
At American, when we tried to sign in for our session, the staffer couldn’t find D’s name on a list and gave us a scolding: “You have to sign up for a visit, you can’t just show up!” When D showed her the confirmation email on her phone she grudgingly signed us in, no apologies or anything. At least they had a big fridge full of AU branded bottled water.
At SUNY Stony Brook our guide brought us to his suite in the dorm. A few students were hanging out in the living room including one who was working on his laptop dressed head to fingertip to toe in a red lycra full bodysuit, something like this one
http://www.amazon.com/Morphsuits-Red-Morphsuit-Adult-Costume/dp/B008Y241G0/ref=cts_ap_2_fbt
On the same tour a dad asked “What time do they kick the boys out of the girls dorm?” He then told the story of how he had had his first sexual experiences when he was a college student living in another Stony Brook dorm.
Re. “irregardless”, Merriam-Webster classifies it at “non-standard” and has this paragraph:
Usage Discussion of IRREGARDLESS
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.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless
I believe the term inflammable has now disappeared from official usage, because it was confusing.
One father spent 5+ minutes grilling the Syracuse student tour guide about underage drinking policy in the dorms. I can understand a question or two, but the tour guide was obviously uncomfortable and said multiple times that she wasn’t sure because as a recruited athlete in a difficult major, she didn’t drink. Most uncomfortable minutes of the tour.
I loved that Northeastern was obviously trying to get every engineering student in the crowd to apply, while the University at Buffalo dean of engineering spoke for 20 minutes about how engineering isn’t for everyone and that many of us will be weeded out early. I loved the blunt honesty.
Last one- the tour guide at MIT was completely over the place. She blabbered on about the most insignificant stuff… I just didn’t expect to get an outwardly air headed tour guide at such a prestigious school.
We went to the fine arts info session at Ohio State for the child who was the trailing sibling for most of the tours we went to this summer, and it (at least the design part) sounded similar to the engineering session @SoCcErTrAcK2016 mentioned—you probably won’t get in, so you might as well not even try. Honesty like that is good, actually, and it’s a shame it was a refreshing change.
As far as head-scratch moments I recently saw, there were the questions from parents about Greek life at Colgate. The tour guide said there are plenty of social options for non-Greeks there, and in fact the proportion of Greeks on campus has been dropping lately—and so two of the parents (parents of two different potential students, I’m pretty sure) started grilling the tour guide for about 5 very long minutes about this, expressing both skepticism that only a minority of Colgate students are in fraternities/sororities* (based, it seemed, on the fact the the tour guide wasn’t in a sorority and therefore might not be telling the truth) and dismay that Colgate students may be abandoning the “wonderful opportunities” (as one of the parents put it) of Greek life. I get it, you want your kids to go Greek, but they were really pushing the whole conversation in a weird direction. (Great tour otherwise, including parental behavior, though.)
- Which is a true statement, as you can find via our good friend Google.
The expression is “reputuation lags reality” for those parents who were so tiresome as to bang on about a Greek life scene at Colgate that is in decline. There are now 5 fraternities when there were 6 a year ago and 3 sororities on this 2950 student campus. And with the new residential living centers (RLCs) coming on stream there are more interesting non-Greek options.
When I was an underclassman at Colgate I conducted campus tours and remember some complicated parents posing questiona about issues that were out of place or outdated- to my mind at the time. One extreme case was about having a John Birch chapter, what version of the Bible was taught and some other pointed questions I’d prefer not to repeat… Far preferable it would be, wouldn’t it, for applicants - and not parents- to take the lead and ask questions of relevance to them. And take the tour guide’s views in stride, move on and conduct further research from there.
Go 'gate!
Let’s see. My dad is usually the embarrassing parent, talking to the tour guide. He isn’t that bad but asks where they are from, how they like it, what their parents think of it etc.and he kept saying “this is so different than it was 32 years ago.”
@readingclaygirl, you are undoubtedly far too young to remember the show, but there was a detective called Columbo who would get lots of information by bumbling along, asking lots of questions, being underestimated by everyone, etc. My kids refer to my variant of this as “wagging my tail.” It might be embarrassing at times, but I think it comes from a good place.
Eh! What’s wrong with saying “this is so different than it was 32 years ago” (33 in my case)? It is!
P.S. “in my day” full-time resident tuition at my state flagship was 700/semester and I think room & board was like $6K/year even for the nicer dorms. You got your bachelor’s for $30-40K, minus any grants and scholarships.
None of this $250K full-pay nonsense that they MIGHT bring down to $200K if it suits their purposes.
For our two older children, there seemed to be at least two power dads on their blue tooth head sets on every tour and several moms on 4 inch spiky heels (to walk miles across campuses, up and down stairs, Yikes!). It got to be a running joke with us, trying to guess who would be “the dad.”
Most people were wearing sneakers for child #3’s tours. Quite a change in 5-8 years.
"My dad is usually the embarrassing parent…and he kept saying “this is so different than it was 32 years ago.”
On one tour we were on at a big state U with lots of parent alumni the tour guide started the tour by saying "Many of your questions will be answered by this statement “Sometime in the last 30 years Sir or M’am.” (as in "when did they take the phones out of the dorms?, since when can you eat at restaurants in town as part of a meal plan? etc…)
What made me scratch my head was two different times when families showed up at information sessions/tours only to walk out after finding out that the school did not offer their major. On a visit to Lafayette College one potential applicant asked about the accounting major-which is not offered there. Another family left the Muhlenberg visit after finding out the school does not offer a major in Latin I simply cannot fathom why a family would make a trip to visit a college without checking out the available majors online first.
Because it’s geographically close to the other schools they were visiting.
@jackrabbit14, in an earlier post (#273), you wrote:
You simply must push through societal barriers and say the embarrassing thing: pull the person aside quietly and say: “the advice you gave was wonderful – but your credibility may be called into question when you used the non-word ‘irregardless.’”
Sometimes a situation calls for embarrassment-be-damned: just say it. I’d be similarly as blunt with obnoxious fellow parents who dominated the tour with mindless/inappropriate questions too. I’m too old to be embarrassed – especially if everyone’s time is being jeopardized.
“Irregardless” is a real word, although not nearly as commonly used as its synonym “regardless.” The problem is that the vast majority of people who use it don’t know that it’s non-standard and think they’re using the preferred term. It makes the user, even if he or she is correct, sound like a yokel.
The issue of whether something is a “real word” is philosophical, and may depend on whether the dictionary you use is prescriptive or descriptive. “Ain’t” is a real word, too.
Standards are different for written and spoken language.
I tried not to be “that dad” on tours, but when DS visited my alma mater, and we went into my freshman dorm and walked right past my dorm room, and visited all my other old haunts, it was hard to not say anything. Not sure how well I succeeded.
I should say, former dorm room, it was converted into a bathroom “sometime in the last 30 years.”