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If you are a person who is complaining about the fact that Merriam-Webster has added "irregardless" to its dictionary, you do not understand how dictionaries work. Dictionaries merely report how people use language. They don't dictate how language should be.
Now that "irregardless" appears in a dictionary, someone can look it up, learn that it's considered nonstandard and conclude that they shouldn't use it in formal context because people will judge them for not knowing the rules.
But also if you are telling someone that a word they used "isn't a word," then you don't understand how words work. If someone says something and you understand fully what they are trying to express because of those words, then they are words. They did their job.
Outside of the context of formal writing or formal speaking, if you are telling people that they are using language incorrectly *even though you understand them fully* you are just being a jerk. Your correction is a power play to make that person less than you. Stop doing this.
This is in particular a problem for white people and for educated people of all colors. White people love telling nonwhite people that they don't speak correctly, even when those they fully understand what those nonwhite people are trying to say. If you do this, you're a dick.
White or not, if you understand someone's nonstandard English but also conclude that the speaker is unintelligent, you're a classist jerk. And in correcting them, you're not actually helping; you're just showing off the fact that you had the benefit of education. You're a bully.
You should also understand that a lot of words you use and the way we pronounce them would have been deemed incorrect by a lot of people in previous decades.
So yeah. If this is what you're choosing to complain about today, you have weird priorities *and also* you don't understand English well enough to complain about it. https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/1278313452054949889
Okay, less angry followup: If you want to blow the mind of some prick who prides themself on speaking "proper English," tell them that they pronounce things wrong all the time, including the verb "can" — the one meaning "to be able to do a thing." They'll be all "No I don't."
But they do. We all do, and it's super interesting. So most of the time, we pronounce the word "can" with the last sound being the one we associate with the letter "n" — like it's spelled, so to speak. However, in other cases we swap that sound out with different ones...
If "can" is followed by "play" or other words whose initial sound requires you to close your mouth to make them, we actually pronounce it "cam." It's easier to go from "m" to "p" than it is to go from "n" to "p," because "n" makes you open your mouth and move your tongue forward.
That's not all: if "can" is followed by "go," whose initial sound is pronounced at the back of the mouth, we pronounce it "cang," because the sound represented in English with "ng" is also back there. Everyone does this.
Pay attention to how your mouth moves when you say things and you will notice that we substitute sounds all the time, and not even subtly. You can hear these swaps very plainly. I edit podcasts and I can hear when people are doing it. We are just trained not to notice them.
The person who prides themselves on speaking "proper English" will swear that they don't do this, that only a lazy-mouthed speaker would. But unless you're concentrating on purposefully speaking "correctly" every time, you will pronounce it "cam" and "cang," because it's natural.
The point being that everyone goes off the playbooks all the time, linguistically speaking, and in fact that is how the language is actually supposed to work, just to facilitate communication. To focus on one aberration you don't like is silly — and telling of your own flaws.
And if *that* doesn't work, tell them to look up Merriam-Webster's suggested pronunciation for the word "hamster" and ask them how that "p" got in there. And then they will notice that phantom "p" every single time.
