This article was originally published by Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Chicago’s neighborhoods. Sign up for their newsletters here.

As ICE patrols swarm Chicago, the tamale vendors who serve up steaming hot corn husks from the sidewalks or sell them to hungry bar patrons from coolers have retreated from their regular spots for fear of being snatched.

That has prompted a brigade of bicyclists to take to the streets in a show of support, buying out the vendors so they can go home to safety while making the money they need to survive.

At least three street vendors have been detained by federal agents since the Trump administration started operations Midway Blitz and At Large last month. The controversial immigration enforcement operations are supposed to target undocumented people with serious criminal histories — but many Chicagoans have reported loved ones being taken even if they do not have a history.

Cycling x Solidarity, a collective of Chicago cyclists who organize group rides and mutual aid efforts, will host a Street Vendor Bike Tour Saturday (November 1) with the Street Vendors Association of Chicago. The ride will begin 10 a.m. local time at Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park and wind through Pilsen and Little Village, where the group will buy food from street vendors.

All purchases are considered funds for vendors and not donations since Cycling x Solidarity’s work is not tax-deductible, said Rick Rosales, a community organizer with Cycling x Solidarity.

The Saturday ride is an extension of an initiative that started last month when the group decided to collect funds to buy out vendors in Pilsen and Little Village so vulnerable residents could pack up early and avoid federal agents. Riders paid the vendors in cash and then passed out the food to people in need throughout Chicago, Rosales said.

Cycling x Solidarity’s rides benefit vendors of all types, including those who sell tamales, elotes and tortas throughout Pilsen, Hermosa and Little Village.

The group has organized similar events like Burrito Brigade, where cyclists deliver burritos to Chicagoans living in encampments and shelters, and an unemployment support group that provides resume help, networking and a place to air out job search frustrations.

Rosales hopes to make the Saturday vendor tour part of a series, he said.

“We’re providing an opportunity to support vendors and hearing their stories, to make this so it’s not just transactional,” he said, adding that the group is always looking for translators who can help. “They’re gonna introduce themselves so we can support them in that way.”

Rosales lived in Indianapolis for 12 years, and he saw virtually no street vendors, he said. But in Chicago, where street vendors are a common sight, they stir “literally warm and figuratively warm” feelings in him.

“To me, it embodies what it means to be an American,” he said. “My fondest memories are them handing these warm tamales for a reasonable price and being able to support them and their hustle. I think a lot of Chicagoans have a similar feeling toward them. They cherish the vendors in their neighborhood.”

The tense political climate has pushed many vendors into the shadows, said Maria Orozco, development manager and outreach coordinator with the nonprofit Street Vendors Association of Chicago. The organization helps street vendors obtain insurance, licenses and Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers.

“It’s been really tough on them. And then the people that have the opportunity to go out and sell or just risk it, they’re not getting as much sales as they used to,” Orozco said. “So it’s something very traumatizing for people to see … It’s very unexpected. I think Covid wasn’t even this bad.”

For Orozco, the impact on street vendors is personal. Her family of four, including Orozco’s sister, began selling tamales, elotes and chicharrones about a decade ago on the corner of 79th Street and Pulaski Road in Ashburn. Both her parents still work as vendors, but her mother hasn’t ventured out for fear of ICE, nor have they gone to the church where they once set up shop, Orozco said.

“We always used to complain that we can’t have family Funday Sunday, and now we haven’t worked in weeks,” Orozco said, adding that her sister does the grocery shopping so her mother can stay home. “It doesn’t feel real, what’s going on.”

In spite of the bleak mood weighing over many Chicagoans since the Trump administration launched Operation Midway Blitz, Cycling x Solidarity’s initiative has inspired other cyclists to embark on their own vendor buyouts. Humboldt Park resident Stephanie Reid wasn’t able to attend one of Rosales’ recent rides but still wanted to help.

“I stole Rick’s idea,” Reid joked. “When all the ICE activity increased, I said, ‘I have a pretty generous network of friends. Let me go buy out some vendors on my own.’”

Reid posted on Facebook that she wanted to raise a few hundred bucks to buy out local street vendors. She received donations from all around the United States via Zelle and Venmo, she said. She drove around West Town, Logan Square and Humboldt Park with her husband and 14-year-old, buying out $200 worth of tacos from one vendor and $120 worth of tamales from another vendor so they could return to their homes.

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The outing turned into a teachable moment for Reid, showing her teen the importance of helping her neighbors, she said. She was also surprised to learn that not only could her teen use the Spanish they learned in school to translate conversations with vendors, but her husband knew Spanish too.

“They’re just a fixture on our streets, and it’s awesome what they’re doing,” Reid said of the vendors. “Personally, I’m a huge fan of Claudio, who goes around and sells his tamales at all the bars. They’re just hardworking people trying to make a living and supporting their families.”

The post Chicago Cyclists Buy Out Tamale Vendors to Keep Them Safe from ICE appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

Almost a decade ago we discussed “why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar” (1, 2); now Manvir Singh has a thoroughgoing and amazingly sensible New Yorker article on the subject (archived). It begins:

I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation. Each evening, after darkness fell, my research assistant and I would call it a night, switch off the veranda’s lone bulb, and retreat to our separate rooms. Alone at last, I snapped on my headlamp, rigged up my mosquito net like a kid building a pillow fort, and read.

Those were good hours, although, honestly, little of the novel has stuck with me—except for Casaubon. The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to an audacious quest. Casaubon is convinced that every mythic system is a decayed remnant of a single original revelation—a claim he plans to substantiate in his magnum opus, “The Key to All Mythologies.” He means to chart the world’s myths, trace their similarities, and produce a codex that, as Eliot puts it, would make “the vast field of mythical constructions . . . intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.”

The ill-fated project founders between the unruly diversity of cultural traditions and the fantasy of a single source, between the expanse of his material and the impossibility of ever mastering it, between the need for theory and the distortions it introduces. These failures are deepened by Casaubon’s limitations—his pedantic love of minutiae (he “dreams footnotes”) and his refusal to engage with scholarship in languages he doesn’t know (if only he’d learned German). […]

Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies” lingered with me less as a cautionary tale than as a temptation. Like Dorothea Brooke—Casaubon’s much younger, idealistic wife and the novel’s protagonist—I found his vision thrilling. As an aspiring anthropologist, I understood the seduction: the promise that somewhere, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there might be a hidden order. Of course, my method was different. I was mud-caked and by myself on a remote island, chasing a crocodile spirit; Casaubon was at his desk, trying to map out myths he barely knew. But, amid all the pedantry, I recognized a kind of kinship.

Singh namechecks Max Müller, James Frazer, Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, and Robert McKee before continuing:

The key that Casaubon craved is particularly alluring. He wasn’t just tracing similarities; he was hunting for a primordial mythology, a long-lost ancestor dimly visible in its descendants. He happened to believe this original tradition was Christian truth, but set aside the apologetics and there’s still something intoxicating about the quest for a key: the notion that, by sifting through myth, we might retrieve the imaginative worlds of the earliest storytellers. Nor is the quest just a scholarly game; it’s an attempt to prove, against all odds, that our wild, warring species shares something irreducible at its core.

Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, even map ancient migrations, but only in myths can we glimpse the inner lives of our forebears—their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and dread. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for lost stories? And, if we can, how far back can we go? Could we finally recover the legends of our earliest common ancestors—the ur-myths that Casaubon so desperately pursued?

If any field lends credibility to the dream of a Casaubonian key, it’s Indo-European studies. Where Frazer’s method was freewheeling, Indo-Europeanists are exacting. […] Today, it’s broadly accepted that languages as different as English, Welsh, Spanish, Armenian, Greek, Russian, Hindi, and Bengali descend from a single ancestor: Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have mapped how words spoken five thousand years ago have branched into the webs of vocabulary we know now. My first name, Manvir, for example, fuses two Sanskrit roots with clear European cousins: “man,” meaning “thought” or “soul”—related to “mental” and “mind”—and “vir,” meaning “heroic” or “brave,” as in “virtue” and “virile.”

But reconstruction didn’t end with nouns and verbs. Gods dance on our tongues, and, as scholars compared Indo-European languages, they found striking mythological congruences, too.

He then discusses Laura Spinney (see this LH post) and Calvert Watkins, whose How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics “set the standard for the field”:

Watkins himself was something of a mythic figure. Casaubonian in his learning and drive but without the tragic vanity, he was born in Pittsburgh in 1933 and raised in New York, inheriting from his Texan parents a pride in the Lone Star State, along with a lingering twang. He arrived at Harvard with the class of 1954, and then stayed, first for his Ph.D., and then as a faculty member in linguistics and classics until his retirement, in 2003. His intellectual range was prodigious. By fifteen, he was immersed in Indo-European studies; his knack for languages was so uncanny that people joked he could board a train at one end of a country and disembark at the other fluent in its national tongue. He forgot nothing, and his eye for hidden connections bordered on supernatural. In 1984, reading a fragmentary Luwian text—a cousin to Hittite—he picked out the phrase “steep Wilusa,” a twin to the Greek “lofty Troy [Ilios],” and speculated that it pointed to an epic tradition about Troy that predated Homer. The discovery landed on the front page of the Times.

“How to Kill a Dragon” showed that ancient mythology could be reconstructed not just from scattered names or motifs but from shared poetic formulas—bits of old myth embedded in texts like slabs of pagan altars lodged in the foundations of later temples. Watkins’s prime example was the phrase “he/you slew the serpent,” a formula that crops up everywhere: in Vedic hymns, Greek poetry, Hittite myth, Iranian scriptures, Celtic and Germanic saga, Armenian epics, even spells for healing or harm. “There can be no doubt that the formula is the vehicle of the central theme of a proto-text,” he wrote—a core symbol in Proto-Indo-European culture. His approach made the reconstruction of myth seem less like a guessing game and more like real historical work. […]

The richness of this reconstructed realm raises a bigger question: If we can piece together such a detailed mythoscape from five or six thousand years ago, why not go back further? The Proto-Indo-Europeans are recent arrivals in our species’ story; the Ice Age ended twelve thousand years ago, the out-of-Africa migration took place around sixty thousand years ago, and Homo sapiens emerged about three hundred thousand years ago. Do we still carry stories from those far earlier times?

Some scholars say yes. They’re Casaubon’s heirs, but with better tools, better German, and, sometimes, better judgment. The earliest myth is their holy grail. One of the boldest attempts was undertaken by Michael Witzel, a comparative mythologist at Harvard. In “The Origins of the World’s Mythologies” (2012), Witzel proposed that the world’s myths fall into two superfamilies. One, Laurasian, stretches from Europe and much of Asia to Polynesia and the Americas; it supposedly preserves a story line, at least twenty thousand years old, that runs from creation to apocalypse. The other, Gondwanan, found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, and Australia, is older still, but less coherent; it has a heavenly High God, trickster low gods, and the creation of humans from trees or clay, but lacks a unifying plot.

Witzel, a celebrated Indologist and the founder of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, seemed poised to deliver the key to all mythologies. Yet his theory leans on outdated models of deep history. He believed, wrongly, that New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians split off in a separate early exodus from Africa; genetic evidence shows otherwise. The framework also carries uncomfortable racial overtones: darker-skinned peoples are said to have more archaic, less structured mythologies. The ambition is tremendous, but the result feels mostly like a dead end.

A rival approach puts its faith in data. Yuri Berezkin, a professor at European University at St. Petersburg, has spent nearly sixty years reading some eighty thousand myths and folktales, coding each one for motifs—anything from a crocodile without a tongue to a butterfly stealing fire. The result is a database of unprecedented reach; no earlier folklorist has worked with so many texts from such a range of societies. For Berezkin, patience is everything. When I e-mailed him in 2018 to ask if his summaries could be mined for patterns in heroic tales, he replied, “I think, No. Everything that is easy and quick can hardly be good.” […]

But these motifs—doglike tricksters, a figure visible on the moon, a man who performs difficult tasks to win a bride—are all frustratingly generic. Do they really descend from tales told by our distant ancestors, or are they merely the sort of stories any species with minds and bodies like ours would keep inventing? The question remains open.

This is the core problem for seekers of ur-myths: they lack the names, formulas, and fossilized phrases that make Indo-European studies persuasive. People across continents might link rainbows with snakes, or see rabbits on the moon, or cast foxes, jackals, and coyotes as tricksters. But without recurring lines of verse, without epithets worn smooth by generations, the search for a universal key risks a Casaubonian fate: grand in vision, romantic in intent, and ultimately thwarted by the bounds of what can be known. […]

Spurred by Casaubon’s failed ambition, I set out on my own hunt for patterns after returning from Indonesia. With a colleague, I began building a new database and delved into a century’s worth of comparative analyses. […]

Today’s mythographers have access to sources and tools that Casaubon could never have imagined—vast digital archives, instant machine translation, pattern-finding algorithms that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago. Yet what they keep unearthing is not so much some hidden code or lost ur-myth as the ubiquitous contours of human experience. If there’s a key to all mythologies, it isn’t buried in vanished languages or ancient ruins; it lies in the basic patterns of how we think, feel, and tell stories.

We are living proof of narrative’s power to reach across time and space. We hear stories from distant lands and discover that they’re not altogether unfamiliar. We read about snake killers and thunder gods and find ourselves enthralled. That is the mythographer’s true accomplishment: tracing the social, cognitive, and emotional lines of force that continue to bind us to one another—and to our most ancient tales. It’s what makes the mythographer’s job both daunting and vital. Forget Casaubon’s footnotes or his ignorance of German. His real mistake was to treat myths as dead fossils rather than as living instruments—still moving minds, still shaping worlds.

I wish more popularizers had that ability to retain skepticism even while being tempted by the sirens’ song of endless reconstruction. (As lagniappe, if you like long [1:19] videos, here’s The Most Popular Bad History Theory I’ve Encountered: Proto-Indo-European Religious Reconstruction.)

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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Ironically, I had to censor this due to running ads, but... one day...

Sorry if you have done this already

In September 2025, thirty-eight children from the war-torn Ukrainian city of Sumy arrived at the Tsarnogorsk Monastery of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Bulgaria for what should have been an unremarkable act of Christian charity. Within weeks, the monastery’s former abbot and initiator of this youth camp, Archimandrite Nikanor (Mishkov), found himself suspended from celebrating the Divine Liturgy. The case raises profound questions about humanitarian witness, ecclesiastical authority, and how Orthodox churches navigate their response to suffering amid geopolitical pressures.

A Monastery’s Ministry to War’s Youngest Victims

The Tsarnogorsk Monastery, with its monastic community of eight monks, has hosted children’s summer camps since 2012. But this visit was different. Father Nikanor described the Ukrainian children with striking poignancy: “At first glance, children, like all children—laugh, play, joke. But we can only guess what they carry in their hearts. One of the smallest boys, seeing the cracked paving slabs, asked me whether it was from a bomb.”

“For the first time—and sadly, quite late—we offered shelter to children who have survived the horrors of a real war,” he explained. The monastery welcomed these refugees without precondition, not requiring children to come only from Christian families.

The archimandrite’s announcement on social media was defiant: “I’ve received ‘a well-deserved reward’ for hosting Ukrainian children. We will continue.”

The Official Account: Financial Irregularities

Patriarch Daniel of Bulgaria imposed the suspension following a Diocesan Council meeting, citing Father Nikanor’s failure to maintain proper financial records. The Sofia Metropolis claimed the documentation was inadequate. Was this legitimate governance concern, or an attempt to pressure the monastery indirectly, wrapping ideological reasons in financial accusations?

Father Nikanor contests this on practical grounds. “When I arrived here, there was nothing but an empty field—everything you see today at Tsarnogorsk Monastery was built from scratch. I never received any financial records from the previous abbot, and no one from the Sofia Metropolis ever instructed me to prepare such reports.”

The deeper dispute concerns revenue. Father Nikanor objected to the metropolis’s demands that the monastery contribute money regularly—a sort of “church tax.” “I told them that I was serving in the church, not in the business corporation.”

“Neither Patriarch Maxim nor Patriarch Neophyte made any such demands,” Father Nikanor observed. Never before in Bulgaria have patriarchs been so eager for cash—a practice more prevalent in the Russian Church, which the new patriarch now seeks to introduce. Since Daniel’s election, more than forty clergymen, or ten percent of the diocese, have left for other Bulgarian dioceses for the same reason.

Notably, the accounting irregularities cited do not concern the significant sums spent restoring the monastery from ruins—these were properly audited by state authorities. The complaints concern only modest daily revenues from candle sales and monastery property.

The monastery brotherhood stands entirely with Father Nikanor. “Father Nikanor and I have been serving together for twenty-two years,” said Father Adrian, a monk since 2000. “For thirteen years we have been organizing children’s camps, fulfilling the words of Christ. I am completely bewildered by this punishment. It is both unfounded and uncanonical!”

The Bulgarian public is quite clear about the reasons why Patriarch Daniel decided to sanction Nikanor. They lie in his critical views on the Bulgarian Church’s new positioning in the Orthodox world, and his condemnation of the Russian Church’s role in the Russian occupation of Ukraine. This mirrors the model that Russian Patriarch Kirill implemented, dismissing dozens of clergymen who opposed his public support for Putin. The same model is now being implemented by Serbian Patriarch Porfirije, who initiated legal proceedings against theologians, and now a bishop, who publicly criticized the Serbian Church for supporting Vučić against the students.

The Unspoken Context: Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine

“I can’t say there’s a connection between Ukrainian children in our monastery and my suspension—only God knows,” declared Father Nikanor. “But it’s a very unpleasant coincidence. I warned him that this punishment would be extremely unpleasant, that it would cause exactly what it’s causing now.”

The broader ecclesiastical context cannot be ignored. In summer 2024, Patriarch Daniel told Bulgarian National Television that the Bulgarian Orthodox Church does not recognize the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which received autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2019. He cited concerns about “violence, church seizures, and the killing of priests,” claiming that “churches transferred to the OCU remain empty”—language echoing positions held by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Bulgaria’s Orthodox Church is among ten local churches declining to recognize the OCU, maintaining communion instead with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church previously under Moscow. This occurs within complex political realities: Bulgaria is a NATO and EU member, yet maintains significant ties with Russia. The Bulgarian Church’s relationship with the Russian Church has traditionally been close, creating tensions as the war forces churches to navigate between humanitarian imperatives and institutional loyalties.

Against this backdrop, a Bulgarian monastery’s decision to host Ukrainian refugee children becomes more than simple charity. It becomes a statement about whose suffering the Church chooses to acknowledge.

Personal relations between Nikanor and Daniel were tense from the beginning. When Daniel, then Metropolitan of Vidin, repeated Russian propaganda and blamed Ukraine for its misfortune, Nikanor publicly distanced himself. Since then, these two have become the faces of two streams in Bulgarian Orthodoxy: the pro-Russian one and the pro-European one, oriented toward the Phanar. Before the patriarchal elections, Nikanor declared that Bulgaria was not a Russian province and did not believe Daniel would be elected. When it happened, Nikanor declared everything was “like in a KGB textbook” and that he would leave the Bulgarian Church. After meeting with Daniel days later, the two reconciled publicly. But in January this year, Nikanor suddenly resigned as abbot and sought to transfer to another diocese. Daniel as patriarch has never visited Nikanor’s monastery, and other priests have been given an oral directive to stay away.

Father Nikanor’s assessment is unambiguous: “I hope for a final divorce from them—both in this world and in the one to come!” His respect for the Patriarch, he stated flatly, “is now gone.”

Questions for Orthodox Witness

This incident invites uncomfortable reflection. If the suspension truly addresses financial mismanagement, it raises questions about supporting monastic leaders in administrative obligations while respecting monastic charisms.

If, however, the Ukrainian children’s visit played any role—whether as primary motivation or as a factor making existing tensions untenable—the implications are more troubling still. It suggests that humanitarian response to war’s victims can be constrained by ecclesiastical politics, and that acts of mercy become suspect when they challenge institutional alignments.

The Orthodox Church confesses a faith proclaiming Christ’s particular concern for children, for the suffering, for those displaced by violence. When a small boy at Tsarnogorsk Monastery mistakes cracked pavement for bomb damage, his question reveals both the trauma he carries and the moral urgency of the Church’s response.

The canonical tradition provides bishops with broad authority over clergy and monasteries to maintain church order. Yet the same tradition insists that episcopal authority must serve the Church’s evangelical mission. When these principles appear to conflict, when institutional loyalty seems to constrain humanitarian witness, the Church faces a crisis not merely of governance but of credibility.

Father Nikanor has announced his intention to continue serving Ukrainian children regardless of consequences. Whether his defiance represents prophetic witness or canonical insubordination depends partly on facts still unclear. But the question his case poses remains, and it will not be silenced by administrative procedures: Will the Church’s response to human suffering be determined by the gospel’s demands, or by geopolitical calculations that increasingly fracture Orthodox unity?

The children from Sumy, laughing and playing in a Bulgarian monastery garden while carrying unspoken trauma, deserve better than to become pawns in ecclesiastical politics. They deserve the Church’s unambiguous compassion. That this should even be controversial reveals how far the Church can drift from its own first principles.

The post Punishment After Compassion: A Bulgarian Monastery’s Ukrainian Children and Questions of Orthodox Witness appeared first on Public Orthodoxy.

 Facebook's Captain Grammar Pants laid down the law this week: "Irregardless is a double negative, and we all know that we can’t not never, no way, no how, use a double negative. You mean 'regardless.' If you use 'irregardless,' regardless of the consequences, you might not get that job interview. Please be aware that certain dictionaries that SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS have given up the fight and now accept 'irregardless' as a synonym of regardless. I do not! Stem the tide of ignorance and use the correct word, regardless!"

This post predictably brought out the peververein in force to chime in and offer additional crotchets. Whinge as you like, but English is, and continues to be, what we, its speakers and writers, collectively make it over time, and we made irregardless  a word some time ago, as I posted out in a post five years ago: 

Irregardless is too a word; you just don't understand dictionaries

While off for the holiday yesterday, I witnessed a spasm of dictionary panic online, after someone discovered that Merriam-Webster includes irregardless in its dictionaries.

Responses varied: [Gasp] [Clutch pearls] [Recline on chaise longue, applying cold cloths to forehead], accompanied by sentiments such as “Not a word,” “English is Over,” and “The worrrrrld is coming to an end.”

Let’s unpack the misapprehensions crowding together here.

Take “not a word” first. Irregardless is by any measure a word. It has a spelling and a pronunciation. It has a meaning, “regardless.” (Not unusual for English to have more than one word for the same meaning.) It has an etymology, a combination of regardless and irrespective. It has a history, surfacing in the United States circa 1900, with multiple citations since.

When people say that irregardless is “not a word,” then, they can’t mean it literally. What they mean is that it is not a word in use in standard English (which Merriam-Webster points out with the note “nonstandard”).

So we arrive at our second misapprehension, that standard English is the One, True English, all other dialects being inferior, subliterate, nasty. But there is no English Academy (laus Deo) to determine what is “correct” or “proper” English, which is instead the most democratic thing we have. Dialects bobble up against one another, and you get to choose from them whatever suits your purpose.

Let’s look at wicked Merriam-Webster, which had the temerity to include this word. Someone inquired whether any other dictionary does so. I reach over to the shelf adjacent to my desk and find irregardless in the American Heritage Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, and Webster’s New World College Dictionary. All of them, like Merriam-Webster, label the word as “nonstandard” or “informal.”

And they all have some sort of usage note appended to the entry, of which American Heritage offers the most comprehensive: “Irregardless is a word that many people believe to be correct in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. The word was coined in the United States in the early 1900s, probably from a blend of irrespective and regardless. Many critics have complained that it is a redundancy, the negative prefix ir- duplicating the negativity of the –less suffix. Perhaps its reputation as a blend of ill-fitting parts has caused some to insist that it is a “nonword,” a charge they would not think of leveling at a nonstandard word with a longer history, such as ain’t. It is undoubtedly a word in the broader sense of the language, but it has never been accepted in standard English and is almost always changed by copyeditors to regardless.”

(My copy of American Heritage is the fifth edition, from 2011, and it is already beginning to look a little quaint, with its assumption that there are still copy editors.)

Now we arrive at our final misapprehension: what dictionaries are for and how they operate. Just as there is no English Academy dictating correctness, lexicographers are not the club membership committee, deciding what gets in and what gets blackballed. Inclusion in a dictionary does not amount to an imprimatur. Dictionaries exist to tell you what you might want to know about words, both standard and nonstandard: how they are spelled and pronounced, what they mean, where they came from, who uses them. That’s it.

Yesterday’s online kerfuffle was an echo of the brouhaha from half a century ago, when Webster’s Third came out with neutral rather than judgmental notes and was taken to endorse ain’t. Dwight Macdonald had a major hissy fit in the pages of The New Yorker, and the whole clamor is described in David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t.

Now, perhaps you could take a deep, cleansing breath.