Why you might get mad at the dictionary sometimes

Recently, Merriam-Webster dictionary added “irregardless” to its collection.

This addition made quite a few people angry.

However, “irregardless” has been used by English speakers for 200 years, according to Merriam-Webster, and including it in the dictionary is a sign that the word has become ubiquitous.

Some might be indignant because of the way we assume English works, Emily Brewster, Merriam-Webster’s senior lexicographer, tells Inverse.

“Hatred of 'irregardless' has to do with the desire for logic in the language,” Brewester says. We assume the -irr prefix has a negative meaning, because that’s what we’ve encountered before, in words like “irrefutable.”

Take “conversate,” for example, which English speakers have also been using for about 200 years.

Because we have the word “converse,” some people would say “conversate” is redundant — even clunky, Brewster says. But it is a perfectly acceptable word.

“Conversate” also appears in hip-hop and rap music, and is sometimes associated with African American Vernacular English, which gives the anger towards the word a more sinister tone, Brewster says.

Brewster says that writers especially hate this definition of “literally” because they think “the meaning is being robbed.”

What those writers don’t realize, then, is that hyperbolic “literally” has been around since the 1700s. James Joyce, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens all employed this meaning.

The word hatred might come down to a simple misunderstanding of a dictionary’s purpose. Dictionaries do no assign “correct” meanings — they record what people already use.

Sometimes, words like “conversate” or “irregardless” become “established because speakers in the language find it useful,” Brewster said.