Merriam-Webster Now Recognizes 'Irregardless' as a Word Because There Are No More Rules

I've taken every punch 2020 could throw at me like a damn champ. COVID-19. The murder hornets. The Godzilla dust clouds. I've made it through it all.

This broke me.

It was my understanding that Merriam-Webster was supposed to be the last line of defense against people taking a giant piss all over the English language, but I guess that's a war I'm now going to have to wage alone.

Obviously language evolves. And it makes sense for Merriam-Webster to add words like "selfie" or "blog" into our lexicon, because those are things which did not previously exist and we now have a commonly accepted way to refer to them. But "irregardless" is just a way people have been misusing a real word — in the process making it mean the precise inverse of what they're trying to say — and now that just means the same thing now.

I had a teacher in high school who said "irregardless" so many times I thought it had to be some sort of bit. It was maddening. And now he gets to take a victory lap for being wrong long enough to make Merriam-Webster relent?

I can't even think of an example to use for this situation because it's so patently absurd. It would be like enough people just using the word "orange" to mean "purple" and then deciding that those two words were the same now.

This is unequivocally the worst thing to happen in 2020. There are no more rules.