irregardless, still earlier yet"

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

This seems a plausible connection. Over and above the rough
chronological correspondence, both 'irregardless' and 'infer' for
'imply' were presumably perceived as dialect or nonstandard turns on
items that were associated with a literate register, and hence as
emblems of semiliteracy -- or more specifically, I suspect, of
semiliterate efforts to speak or write correctly. MWDEU quotes a 1932
letter from a Boston University philosopher in the MW files that says
of the 'infer'/'imply distinction: "... no cultivated person has in my
hearing ever confused the two words. It is, however, the constant
practice of the uneducated and the half-educated, to use 'infer' for
'imply'." Similarly, 'irregardless' is often labeled 'semiliterate', a
"barbarism," and so forth. In fact a writer in a 1970 number of Word
Ways writes of 'infer': "the speaker (nearly always il- or semi-
literate) is perverting the language. 'Are you inferring you can beat
me in chess?' grates on my ears in the same way as does irregardless."

But why did critics seize on these items at that moment? I don't think
we ask that question enough. Having demonstrated that such-and-such a
bugbear (literally, disinterested, etc.) was actually in reputable
usage long before the critics seized on it, we're usually content to
conclude that the criticisms are unwarranted; we don't go on to ask
why the item suddenly became an object of censure after passing
without notice for decades. The larger question is why a particular
handful of items are fetished to exemplify the language degeneration
in a given era. Some of this is arbitrary or capricious, I'm sure. But
language critics are always churning out hundreds of novel
proscriptions, and there has to be a reason why certain of these
capture the immediate fancy while most of the rest remain individual
crotchets. And I do think we can come up with plausible specific
explanations for a lot of these, like Swift's 'mob', 'disinterested',
'contact', 'like' and '-wise', and 'impact'.

Anyway, my guess is that there is a reason why 'infer' and
'irregardless' became bugbears in the early 20th c. though it might be
too hard to pin down even for someone with the requisite Americanist
chops -- maybe because of the increasing social heterogeniety of the
college population (what Henry James was clearly most troubled by in
"The Question of Our Speech")?  Or of the business workforce? Or
because of a shifting conception of what "good usage" signified? I
think we're sometimes so bent on discrediting prescriptivism in the
large that we wind up slighting its singular role at specific cultural
moments.

Geoff

>
> At 1:41 PM -0700 7/29/10, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote:
>> And now Larry reminds me that Ben reminded him that Motivated Grammar
>> had some of these last year, and that Richard Hershberger has taken
>> it
>> back to 1795. Which leads to the question, why did it wait to become
>> an Issue -- "that most monstrous of non-words," as Life put it --
>> until the early 20th century?
>>
>> Geoff
>
> Possibly for the same reason that the use of "infer" for "imply"
> (i.e. 'to lead to a conclusion' rather than 'to draw a conclusion'),
> which is amply attested in Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Hardy, et al.
> (as I mentioned a few weeks ago in another connection, citing the
> extensive entry in MWDEU), only because a prescriptivist bugbear in
> the early 20th century.  There were other issues involved with that
> one (for one thing the latter isn't a case of "not in *the
> dictionary* so there's no such word" issue and for another, there's
> an issue of "infection" between "personal" and "impersonal" _infer_
> as we were discussing in that early June thread), but the timeline is
> somewhat similar.
>
> LH
>

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