irregardless, AND MISFEASANCE?!?!?

[Joel S. Berson]

At 7/30/2010 11:45 AM, David Barnhart wrote:
>I heard "misfeasants" this morning on NPR of all places.

There is of course misfeasance (and malfeasance), and this form seems
natural and more pleasing than the also-absent misfeaser.  (Or was it
an adjective on NPR?)  And where else on the radio would one expect
to hear such a word?  (There are a few hits on Google -- including
one from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary ... which says it is
not a word.)

Was someone thinking of the difference between misconduct and
malconduct?  That pair of oppositely-gendered advice columnists.

If the context was the recently-expelled Russian spies, I could
imagine such a distinction, whether -feasance or -conduct -- since
they may have been doing nothing illegal, merely gathering and
passing on information available to the public.

Joel


>DKB
>
> >Larry Horn wrote:
>
> >Those benighted ignorami Ruskin and
> >London--didn't they realize there's no such word
> >as "unregardless"?  It's not in the dictionary!
> >What they meant, of course, was "irregardless"!
>
> >LH
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org