Early appearances of "irregardless"

[sagehen]

>At 12:48 AM -0400 5/4/07, James C Stalker wrote:
>>Unthaw is not uncommon in adult language.  Perhaps we are dealing with overt
>>and covert negatives?  Break = undo, unmake; thaw = unfreeze.
>>
>>JCS
>
>I've actually written a couple of papers on un-verbs addressing this
>very issue.  My claim (following, although not precisely, some
>observations of Whorf on "cryptotypes" as well as a suggestion of
>Michael Covington) is that un-verbs occur most naturally (and
>relatively productively, especially in the speech of children between
>3 1/2 and 5 1/2 or so) when they restore a natural state. In some
>cases, as with "unthawing" but obviously not "unfreezing", this will
>produce a verb identical in meaning with a simple verb (or one sense
>of a simpler verb) with that same meaning, in which case the result
>will be felt to be redundant.  To quote myself:
>
>When the prefix attaches to a positive, goal-oriented accomplishment
>verb, the state-change depicted by the un-verb is one which in effect
>helps entropy along, rather than creating or restoring order.  But
>when un- attaches to a verb stem which itself denotes an
>entropy-producing, inherently negative or source-oriented
>accomplishment, the resultant un-verb can only be understood with
>pleonastic reversal, as equivalent to its base, denoting an action of
>removal, liberation, or (de)privation.
>
>There is pressure (both language-internal and prescriptivist) against
>such innovations; forms like "unloose(n)" have been ridiculed as
>illogical for hundreds of years, but they do serve a function, since
>the meaning of the un-verb (or redundant unXless adjective) will be
>unambiguously entropic, while the meaning of the bare verb might not
>be so obvious.  This is why Amelia Bedelia, the proverbial literalist
>housekeeper of the Peggy Parish children's stories, exclaims on
>reading an instruction to dust the furniture, "Did you ever hear tell
>of such a silly thing?  At my house we undust the furniture.  But
>each to his own way."  And she happily proceeds with her dusting,
>with the help of some fragrant powder she discovers in the bathroom.
>
>LH
>
 ~~~~~~~~
Something like this, operating in reverse, happened in product labelling,
perhaps at the behest of the product safety people, when "inflammable" got
changed to "flammable" 40 or 50 years ago.  I suppose "inflammable" was
deemed to be liable to misinterpretation as UNflammable.
AM

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
War is a rip-off +=+=+=+ Peace is a bargain
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org