Common misconception partially coincident with urban legend
English language
Irregardless is a word. Nonstandard, slang, or colloquial terms used by English speakers are sometimes alleged not to be real words, despite appearing in numerous dictionaries. All words in English became accepted by being commonly used for a certain period of time; thus, there are many vernacular words currently not accepted as part of the standard language, or regarded as inappropriate in formal speech or writing, but the idea that they are not words is a misconception. Other examples of words that are sometimes alleged not to be words include burglarize, licit, and funnest which appear in numerous dictionaries as English words.
African American Vernacular English speakers do not simply replace "is" with "be" across all tenses, with no added meaning. In fact, AAVE speakers use "be" to mark a habitual grammatical aspect not explicitly distinguished in Standard English.
"420" did not originate from the Los Angeles police or penal code for marijuana use. California Penal Code section 420 prohibits the obstruction of access to public land. The use of "420" started in 1971 at San Rafael High School, where a group of students would go to smoke at 4:20 pm.
The word crap did not originate as a back-formation of British plumber Thomas Crapper's aptronymous surname, nor does his name originate from the word crap. The surname "Crapper" is a variant of "Cropper", which originally referred to someone who harvested crops. The word crap ultimately comes from Medieval Latin crappa.
The use of the word faggot as a pejorative for homosexual men was not derived from the burning of homosexuals at the stake with a bundle of sticks. Homosexuality was never punished with immolation in either England or its colonies. The actual etymology is unknown; it may come from an insult for unpleasant old women, or from British slang for a student that does errands for their superior.
The word fuck did not originate in the Middle Ages as an acronym for either "fornicating under consent of king" or "for unlawful carnal knowledge", either as a sign posted above adulterers in the stocks, or as a sign on houses visible from the road during the Black Death. Nor did it originate as a corruption of "pluck yew" (an idiom falsely attributed to the English for drawing a longbow). It is most likely derived from Middle Dutch or other Germanic languages, where it either meant "to thrust" or "to copulate with" (fokken in Middle Dutch), "to copulate" (fukka in Norwegian), or "to strike, push, copulate" or "penis" (focka and fock respectively in Swedish). Either way, these variations would have been derived from the Indo-European root word -peuk, meaning "to prick".
The expression "rule of thumb" did not originate from an English law allowing a man to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb, and there is no evidence that such a law ever existed. The false etymology has been broadly reported in media including Time magazine (1983), The Washington Post (1989) and CNN (1993). The expression originates from the seventeenth century from various trades where quantities were measured by comparison to the width or length of a thumb.
The word the was never pronounced or spelled "ye" in Old or Middle English. The confusion, seen in the common stock phrase "ye olde", derives from the use of the character thorn (þ), which in Middle English represented the sound now represented in Modern English by "th". Early printing presses often lacked types for the letter þ, meaning that "þͤ" () and "þe" were substituted with the visually similar "yͤ" and "ye", respectively.
The anti-Italian slur wop did not originate from an acronym for "without papers" or "without passport"; it is actually derived from the term guappo (roughly meaning thug or "dandy"), from Spanish guapo.
Xmas did not originate as a secular plan to "take the Christ out of Christmas". X represents the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Χριστός (Christós), "Christ" in Greek, as found in the chi-rho symbol ΧΡ since the 4th century. In English, "X" was first used as a scribal abbreviation for "Christ" in 1100; "X'temmas" is attested in 1551, and "Xmas" in 1721.
partially overlapping with partially intersecting with partially sharing with partially matching with partially aligning with