Wow, I was just discussing this with Facebook friends yesterday. Have a quote:
"Listen, friends, the word irregardless is not a word. It's a fake word that dumb people invented to sound smart because it has one more syllable than the actual word, which is regardless. Regardless and irregardless mean the same thing, except that irregardless doesn't mean anything, because it's a made up word like shtoopy or pergammonus."
After which, everyone pretty much said "pergammonus should be a word" since I had just made it up.
Sooooo...
"pergammonus: the quality of being fair, charitable, or just. (adjective) Usage: Frederick often volunteers at the soup kitchen in order to lead a more pergammonus lifestyle. Etymology: From the Greek kingdom Pergamon, a historical city noted for the charitable actions of it's rulers, the Attalid dynasty, including the remission of taxes, funding of the arts, and eventual bequeathing of the kingdom to the Roman Empire to prevent civil war after the death of last heir."
If you think of language as a fixed form of expression than you are thinking of it in old-fashioned terms. Words change meaning, new words get invented, words get co-opted to mean other things than what they originally did. I'll agree that I hate people using words in ways they weren't intended (such as the above mentioned "irregardless" as used by stupid asses trying to sound smart) but it's not blasphemous for a word to eventually -evolve- (I'm sorry, Spider) over time into something a little different. Maybe that's what the language just wants (I'M SORRY!).
Also, there is a difference between UK and US english, and that's why we don't usually use the Old English Dictionary. Because we don't spell color with a 'u', and we leave the 'h' in herb silent, among other reasons. If I, as a professional writer, were to use incorrect UK English in an article aimed at a US audience, my client might not accept my work. We have some different rules over here than they do there.
