His Reasons Were Far Worse Than Mine

Today's amazing discovery: There is, at large in the world, a Bad Grammar Posse to rival the enormous, vexatious subgroups of the population who say "for all intensive purposes" and "supposably."  (At this point, I consider it a minor victory that my spell check does not recognize "supposably" as acceptable usage.)

In recent days, I have come across not one, not two, but five people who have used the phrase, "inferior motives" to refer to the sneaky, clandestine dealings of others.

Back into the linguistic jungle we go!

Comments

[Carter Wiecking]

Oh my...!

Your blog entry has me twitching and foaming at the mouth, Larissa. I am loading my gun specifically for the next poor sod who commits any of the cited errors within my hearing.

Rock salt only, I swear. Yeah. Just to sting the fools a little. Yeah.

[Ryan]

Irregardless of what you want, people always are going to harken back to those phrases that annoy us most -- and run the gauntlet of ones that are just plain wrong. But, of course, this begs the question as to how far the English language is from becoming the lowest common denominator across the globe. Just pour over a newspaper or a magazine or a press release to see the disconnect in linguistic elegance.

[Janet]

Irregardless-- this is one of my pet peeves.See below from American Heritage Dictionary:
Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir– prefix and –less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.