I kind of like the existence of this construction. The contrast feels, to me, more impactful when I use the less common, more grammatical, non-contracted version. Beyond that, I could not care less.
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irregardless
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… doot do doot doot 
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I Couldn’t Care Less is British English and I Could Care Less is American English. There are 6 times more Americans than British, so the American usage is found more commonly in text. That doesn’t make it “correct”.
Both stylings are valid in context, and most competent speakers of any variety of English will understand either to mean the same thing.
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Supposably you are one of the people this article explaining that irregardless is in fact a proper word refers to as disirregardlessers?
Hey, the times where the British only considered their use of the language “correct”, and the people in the colonies were but barbarians who butchered that noble language are long over, right?
I added a screenshot of what’s behind the link I posted so that you can see what I meant.
So unless all those Americans just started writing books around 1955, that graph would not align with your explanation.
Anyway, what does make it “correct” is the fact that it is informal anyway, and it is an entrenched idiom, i.e. it has been in widespread use for a long time.
My favorite sentence in this article on Merriam-Webster that explains why “I could care less” is correct is this bit:
But if you are the kind of person who cries out against this abomination we must warn you that people who go through life expecting informal variant idioms in English to behave logically are setting themselves up for a lifetime of hurt.
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He’s supposed to be ashamed, but now it looks like he’s just staring at his phone.
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I Care This Exact Amount!
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Interestingly, there’s a similar pairing with the Italian equivalent: “me ne frego” and “non me ne frego” both mean “I don’t care”.
“fregarsi” is a reflexive verb meaning to rub or brush against something, or to harm oneself. The “ne” is a pronominal particle that serves as a shorthand for whatever’s currently under discussion. Literally, “non me ne frego” might be something like “I don’t hurt myself about it”, idiomatically, it’s “I don’t care [about it].” A “menefreghista” is someone who doesn’t care about anything, and “menefreghismo” is the attitude of not caring. It implies a kind of active indifference, a rejection of the expectation that you should care.
I always assumed that “I could care less” (and perhaps “me ne frego”) evolved from a kind of dismissive, sarcastic understatement. “I could care less” carries the implication that although the speaker could possibly care less, it’s not very likely, and the difference between the amount they actually care and not caring at all is very small.
It’s a little like French, where the popular phrase for “not great” is “pas terrible” (literally, “not terrible”). I assume that began as a kind of sarcastic understatement: “How is it? Well, it’s not terrible” and then just became a stock phrase with an idiomatic meaning independent of its original use.
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Likewise, you can’t “login” or “logout”. You never see “signout”, but it’s always with the “login” and “logout”.
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As soon as we open the box and see what the cat has done with the cake, then we’ll know, until then…
Literally that. (In the Shakespearean rude joke sense, anyways.)
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Saw these guys, including the late Chuck D @ Salford University, the ‘Pav’ 1987, a truly awesome gig!
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If you’ll indulge my slightly buzzed speculations, I submit that people who object to “I could care less” actually could care less, because clearly they care a lot about the correct usage. Oh, tasty irony!
Moreover, those who truly do not care should embrace or at least accept the wrongness of “I could care less” as adding emphasis to their apathy. “I care so little that even though it’s theoretically possible that less care could exist on my part, I have no interest in taking any effort to explore that tiny sliver of deep not-caring.” In short, I may not be at the bottom of my well of uncaring, but I don’t care to dig any deeper, because, well, you get the idea…
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I used to be one of those people who constantly policed and corrected other people’s grammar. Then I realized how stupid and annoying that was, so I stopped. I will occasionally relapse, but not very often anymore. Anywho, I cared enough to scan through the comments and leave my own, so obviously…I could care less.
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Whenever anybody drops this one on me, I can actively demonstrate that I am in fact now caring even less what they think, and my caring will continue to decrease in the future. I give half a fuck, and that fuck has a half-life, so they can always get a little fucked.
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“I could care less, but I won’t”
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If you want to make sure you say it correctly, add the word “any.” You’d never say “ I could care any less” but you would say “I couldn’t care any less.”
Also, if you want to piss off someone who says “I could care less,” respond with “oh, how much less?”
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One means not win, the other means not tight. Where’s the difficulty?
My current foremost personal pet peeve (as a curmudgeonly misanthrope I have a menagerie, of course) is everyday. “I go to the park everyday”. No, you go every day, two words. Everyday means commonplace.
And yes, language evolves. That doesn’t mean we automatically have to admit every mistake borne of ignorance into the lexicon.
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That seems nice, but a bit silly. I’d be happy to go into the whys and wherefores of how what you think are normal words are the results of some quite dramatic changes in meaning.
And I wouldn’t even have to resort to such modern shibboleths as “decimate” and “literally”.
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