… and here we see the original problem again
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Absolute 0 on the Caring Scale?
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It’s come to be known as the more sarcastic form (likely to justify it’s existence).
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Thus the less well-known idiom: “You can’t f••• your pie and eat it too.”
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Since we’re talking about grammatical and semantic pet peeves, here’s mine: you cannot shutdown a computer because “shutdown” is a noun. You can shut down a computer because “shut” is a verb and “down” is an adverb, but if you can’t throwup your dinner, then you can’t shutdown (or startup) a computer.
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I just logged in; you beat me by 20 minutes.
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an asymptotic approach.
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This and similar explanations for the phrase “I could care less” never sat well with me, because the phrase “I couldn’t care less” is a complete sentiment, without the need for any implied clauses, and only requires one more syllable. Why would I rely on someone assuming I mean more than I say?
That said, I stopped correcting people’s grammar long ago, because though I do care a bit (OK, more than is probably healthy), I know that language changes, that the way we speak is determined in large part by forces beyond our control, and that regardless of intent, there’s almost no way to correct someone without coming across as an ass.
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Agreed. I only have room for “couldn’t care less.” If you could care less, then it means you care more about this. It’s just WRONG if you’re trying to say the thing is the least important thing in the world to you and you just said you COULD care less.
But I have finally reached an age where I don’t need to try and educate others as to their wrongness.
Also, “comprised" vs. “composed of”. I’ll never hear proper usage, so it’s time to move on.
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“I could care less about this thing”: I care so little about it that I don’t even give a shit about using proper grammar to tell you how little I care. I don’t give a fuck about your inner schoolmarm rapping you across the knuckles every time you hear this phrase either. Maybe I even enjoy that part.
Like if I’m discussing a serial failure of a real estate investor who accidentally scammed his way into being president and did a bunch of crimes, and I accidentally type his name as “Trunp”, I’m well aware that I made a typo, but I am so fucking tired of hearing about his bullshit that I cannot be bothered to go back and correct it. But I can be bothered to go back and insist to autocorrect that I’m “fucking” tired, not “ducking” tired.
If you want to be persnickety you could go into how the change from “I could’t care less” to “I could care less” fits nicely into established ways that languages tend to change over time - syllables get dropped, vowels shift, certain choices become markers of social class, etc - but, well, that would be work.
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People using “I could care less” used to really bother me, but now, not so much. Which means, although I’m not particularly bothered, ironically I could care less.
I have this feeling that there’s a number of idiomatic phrases where negatives got dropped (long ago, and now the standard version is sans-negative), but I can’t think of what they are, now…
It’s funny, there’s all sorts of expressions that are just completely archaic in both general meaning and specific words*, yet they’ve been retained in their original forms, and “could not care less” is quite straightforward, but yet that’s an expression that’s changing.
*I’m very fond of “hoist with one’s own petard.” Since it was coined by Shakespeare, that means it’s also a rude (fart) joke, a double meaning which is also archaic.
That used to irk me, until I acknowledged that the “too” indicates simultaneity, in which case the order doesn’t matter. (Apparently the oldest known version of the expression is “a man can not have his cake and eat his cake,” but the other version was more common until the early 20th century.) What’s interesting to me now is that “have” is ambiguous in modern English - e.g. “let’s have some cake” of course means to eat it, - but it’s using a mostly archaic sense of “have,” but that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
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I’ve only ever heard ‘I could care less’ in the US, so I assume it was one of your cunning Yankee traps to catch us out if we decided to burn the White House down again and force you to call it ‘aluminium’ - like the monsters we are.
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Thanks for saving me the effort here.
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Never put Heisenberg in charge of the dessert menu.
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This is me too. I don’t correct people anymore, but as the t-shirt says, I’m silently judging your grammar…
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I could care less bugs me, because I know they are trying to say they couldn’t care less. That said, I would never correct anyone, because colloquialisms are what they are.
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Snap. I was only recently schooled on that by a friend who read English at Cambridge. So it’s a bit academic.
I am guilty of using this phrase on the regular
That’ll be ‘regularly’, then.
I get slightly annoyed when people correct my grammar
Do they do it … often?
I rather prefer to think it started with someone using the expression with a very exaggerated sarcastic tone saying something along the lines of “like I could care less” and it somehow morphed from there
And google autocorrect hates me writing that I will feed back some feedback. It insists I must feedback some feedback.
Hoist like this?
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With me it’s usually, “I could hardly care less,” or sometimes, “I could scarcely care less.” Though the best construction is, “I don’t care.”
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