Contrast the sympathetic (or at least hostile to usage commentators) treatment of "irregardless" in Webster's Tenth to the sad history of "irrevelant"--a favorite word of a Texas history teacher one of us had in ninth grade. The 1981 Third New International Dictionary pronounces "irrevelant" substandard and then laconically defines it as "IRRELEVANT." The Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Collegiates, however, don't deign to acknowledge the word at all. Does this mean it has fallen below the level of substandard English? Are the Merriam-Webster people implying that there's no such word--despite the incontrovertible evidence supplied by Pershing Junior High School's Miss Ballard and others that "primarily in speech" there is such a word? Are those darn usage commentators somehow to blame? And who decides, anyway?

"Webster's Dictionary of English Usage" points out that the technical term for transposing phonemes (in effect, the atoms of speech) is "metathesis." Examples of standard English words produced by metathesis include "burn" (from a Germanic root that placed the "r" next to the "b") and "crud" (which Webster's Collegiate says derives from the word "curd"). The English Usage dictionary also points out that metathesis can be a two-way street, with "cavalry" rendered as "calvery" and "Calvary" as "Cavalry."