As an aside - word you may have been looking for is irrespective, or perhaps just plain old regardless. irregardless is not a word.
Lots of dictionaries disagree. But not me! I'll join you on this hill, regardless of what those dumb dictionaries say.
The misuse of "literally" and the common use of "irregardless" are the red pills that have turned me into a crotchety old ... prescriptivist.
That means they disagree with you on the definition of the word, but it doesn't make it a synonym of figuratively.
Is that figurative speech?
If I say "I literally broke my arm" after I actually broke my arm, that use is completely correct. But you cannot be literally dead and still type a message, unless it's an automated message that you ordered someone/something to send AFTER you died.
If the answer to this is to avoid the word "literally", and instead replace it with "really, actually, truly" (like I did above), then I might just decide to retire from haunting.
OMG A GOAST SO SPOOKY
Would you be less likely to interpret it as such if the speaker has omitted "literally"?
I would say that that is an example of hyperbole. "I am so figuratively dead right now it's as if I am literally dead." The meaning of literally, there, remains intact.
In the same way, when someone complains that you left them waiting for "days" we don't say "sometimes days means ten minutes" but that sometimes people exaggerate.
So if it’s good enough for Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace, then it’s good enough for me. Literally.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/the-300-year-history-of-using...
There’s beating a dead horse, and there’s railing about the injustice of it all in the shadow of a great oak growing over the horses grave.
"Irregardless" is absolutely a word. It's not a word I personally like, but there's no denying its status.
A number of times now Youtube has shown me a video recommendation that I ignored for days. The thumbnail with that stupid "gobsmacked" expression of the creator (:-O) with some dumb headline in big block letters ("IS GRAVITY A LIE?"). You know what I'm talking about.
Then I finally get around to looking at it closer, and it turns out it's one of my favorite channels with an awesome video! They went with the stupid title and thumbnail because "the algorithm demands it". The actual video itself is great.
These creators get an automatic click from me as well, except when I'm mislead by the thumnail and title into not even realizing it's one of them. Then it takes time for me to discover it. There's been a couple of times where the video I'm mentally spam-filtering appears on the HN front page, and it turns out to be a great video. But had I not seen it here, I would never have clicked on it.
The end result is I don't use their discovery crap at all, because it all looks like garbage I don't care about.
My use of Youtube has become very similar to my use of Xitter - never log in, almost never look at content on their domains, only on other peoples' sites.
I'm sure it works for them on average.
We can assume the metrics, we can see the results, and both seem to line up.
When you DO click on them they're almost always the most mundane things imaginable.