The EconomistJuly 25th 2020 Books & arts 692 But their journey to the top has downs
as well as ups. They encounter shady pro-
moters and snarky critics. They weather er-
ratic sales and dented self-confidence. Jas-
per goes awolin New York; in Rome, Dean
faces imprisonment. Eventually the band
wins critical acclaim and commercial suc-
cess on both sides of the Atlantic. Can any-
thing derail this rollercoaster career?
“Utopia Avenue” itself is not a fast ride.
Some scenes go on too long, others take un-
necessary tangents. Nevertheless it is a
consistently absorbing book, which skil-
fully conveys the excitement and mayhem
of the era, and the hopes and dreams of
those swept up in it. Elf’s sections sketch a
voyage of self-discovery, during which she
recognises her abilities, moves on from a
sponger boyfriend and embraces her true
sexuality. Dean’s story is a cautionary tale
rich with lurid scandals, comic misadven-
tures and family feuds. Jasper develops
into the novel’s most complex character. A
former patient of a Dutch psychiatric clin-
ic, he wrestles with “emotional dyslexia”
and a fear of mirrors. But when he is
plagued by persistent knocking from “the
squatter in his skull”, both his sanity andthe band’s future are threatened.
The later sections told from Jasper’s
perspective are filled with what one figure
in “The Bone Clocks” termed “magickery-
pokery”. Mr Mitchell overdid his mind-
bending flights of fancy in that book; in
this one there is method in his madness.
There are entertaining cameos from fam-
ous faces, notably David Bowie, Francis Ba-
con and Janis Joplin. As ever, characters
from the author’s earlier stories pop up and
pass through this one, often in intriguing
new guises. A lot of fun is had along the
way, by both Mr Mitchell and the reader. 7Johnson The shadowland
“Irregardless” is part of the English language’s penumbra of unorthodox wordsW
hat, theactor Jamie Lee Curtis
recently asked on Twitter, could
make 2020 even more dismal? Her some-
what surprising answer: “Merriam-
Webster just officially recognised ‘irre-
gardless’ as a word.” A horrified emoji
followed; 27,000 people signalled agree-
ment with a “Like”. Many others tweeted
independently about their dismay.
The premise of these gripes was
mistaken. Merriam-Webster hadn’t
“just” recognised irregardless. It appeared
in Webster’s controversial Third New
International Dictionary of 1961, which
also included words such as ain’t and
heighth, to the distress of many. It even
made it into Webster’s Second in 1934,
which many linguistic conservatives
cherish to this day as a totem from an
earlier, more sensible age. Irregardless
also turns up in the American Heritage
Dictionary, which was explicitly created
as a traditionalist response to Webster’s
Third, as well as in the capacious Oxford
English Dictionary.
What is it about irregardless that gets
some people quite so worked up? The
case against it is straightforward. It has
two negative affixes, one at the begin-
ning (ir-) and one at the end (-less), mak-
ing it malformed, those two negatives
possibly even suggesting a positive. It
probably began as an unintentional
mash-up of irrespective and regardless.
Does that mean it is not a word,
though? Who would determine that, and
how? All the words in this sentence,
English-speakers would agree, are words.
They can be found in dictionaries, and
people know how to use them. And
everyone would concur that an unpro-
nounceable, random string of characters
like qtt3pf is not a word. What about
klorf? Harder to tell. (It’s not a word:
Johnson just made it up. But unlikean adverb, used in the same way asre-
gardless. But lexicographers are not
unmindful of the standing of irregardless
among the literati, so all the dictionaries
mentioned here mark it as “nonstan-
dard”, or suchlike.
Still, irregardless isn’t nonstandard in
the way that, say, ain’t is. Ain’t is extreme-
ly common, found in fiction, jocular
standard speech and many dialects.
Irregardless is much more of a fringe
phenomenon. It hardly ever makes it
into edited writing. Data from Google
Books shows it to be only around
1/1,000th as common as regardless (and of
its few instances in print, some are in
meta-discussions of the word’s impro-
priety). The Corpus of Contemporary
American English, another big database
representing a wide swathe of language
from different genres, finds it frequently
in blog comments and unscripted televi-
sion, but hardly anywhere else.
In other words, there is a better case
against irregardless than the fact that it is
malformed. (After all, many words are
malformed: television combines Greek
and Latin roots. Flammable arose from a
misunderstanding of inflammable, which
means “capable of being inflamed” but
was misinterpreted as “not flammable”.)
The real problem is that it has never quite
found a secure place in the English lan-
guage. It may be said now and then by
people who either do not think of it as an
error or do not mind, but the fact that it
virtually never appears in edited prose—
except when discussed as a solecism—
suggests that it may never settle in.
A word it is, but maybe another sense
needs to be added to those dictionaries:
“irregardless: a word that distinguishes
people who do not care much about
English usage from those who care ter-
ribly—and want the world to know it.”qtt3pf, it is pronounceable, and could be.)
How about hangry? Meh? Real words?
Slang? Half-words? It turns out that be-
sides all the unambiguous English words,
many others constitute a kind of penum-
bra of the language. These include dialect
(such as Yorkshire’s nowt, for “nothing”),
terms from foreign languages being used
increasingly in English (such as Arabic’s
hijab), proper nouns that have become
ordinary words (to Google), relatively new
arrivals (woke), and others. Some diction-
aries set out to make a mark by incorpo-
rating as many of these as they can—and
their publishers try to drum up interest by
putting out press releases touting the new
entries. After all, weight aside, the most
helpful dictionary is the one with the most
words, not the fewest.
The case for admitting irregardless is
not that it is lovely, or useful. It is simply
that people occasionally say it. Lexicogra-
phers don’t decide who gets into the club;
they register who’s already in, based on
whether a word is in circulation. Irregard-
lesshas a fixed form (spelling and pro-
nunciation) as well as a clear meaning: it’s