Irregardless had always been a joke, but it now seems to be a joke repeated so often that it sounds right to the ear of those who have heard it all their lives. We reinvent the language every generation and we reinvent it based on what we hear during that critical several year period when we hear the language unencumbered by the dictates of formal education. I count myself as one of the perpetrators of the joke and even to my aged eye regardless looks somehow incomplete.