We learned a little poem in school to keep that straight:
That’s sort of like:
“There was a young lady called Cholmondely
Whose face was both shapely and colmondely…” 
I love the picture of some teacher sitting up late at night thinking, “OK, now how can I twist my lesson plan to fit in this little verse?”
Whoops. That’s a mite embarrassing in a language pet peeves thread, ain’t it?
I called an asterisk an asterick.
Gotcha ya! I was staring at fishbicycle’s post wondering what was the matter with it…
Sarcasm is all about intent. Almost no one who uses this phrase actually intends it this way. It seems that this more likely revisionism among people who picked up the habit and don’t like being grammatically incorrect.
(bolding mine)
I have my own pet peeves as well.
Like multiple exclamation points.
Joe: Oh, I mean it is a moot point.
flight: You think so?
Joe: Oh yeah, it doesn’t matter.
flight: Then why did you say it was debatable?
Now there is a lost cause.
We are Devo. 
Sorry, I digress.
My skin crawls when I hear the word minus used as a verb.
“Well, I’ll just take your $400 credit and minus it from the $500 dollars you owe.”
I want to grab them and shake them like a terrier shakes a rat. I know language is fluid and evolves, I accept that, but I’m not a perfect, rational thinking machine and so it bothers me. Heck, I probubly have* spelling and grammer errors in this very post!
*I originally typed: I’ve probubly got… but the earlier post caused me to think it over and re-write.
I’m an insurance agent. It drives me toad-licking psycho when someone calls and says “Can I get a car insurance quota?”
I thought of one I haven’t seen mentioned: “spell checker”. I really don’t need a software tool that will check the integrity of my magical incantations, thank you, what would be useful to me is a “spelling checker” that will tell me if I’ve mispelled any words.
Yes, I know, this battle was totally lost years ago.
There’s another thread going on that uses “orgasm” as a verb. It’s not a verb, regardless of what Hite did to it all those years ago.
Since I didn’t post this to that thread, but am doing it here, I’m maybe not taking the fight to the enemy the way I should. But I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Probably so.
Well, it is listed as a verb in the dictionary, as is “suicide”!!
Which reminds me of another of my battles: if someone strangled himself to death by hanging, he hanged himself. Not hung, darn it.
:smack:
I believe you, but could you explain?
So you know that secretly, deep down, they’re violating the grammatical rules in their hearts?
:: sigh ::
“I could care less” is an idiom, a set phrase. People recite it - as with all idioms - as a single unit, known linguistically as a “lexeme”. There’s no point in criticizing the use of idioms - they’re part of how language works. If you’d ever bothered to listen carefully, you’d notice that the two phrase “I could care less” and “I couldn’t care less” have vastly different intonational patterns, which suggests that they probably do have some story behind them. Stephen Pinker used the intonational patterns to argue that the former is sarcastic, though I’m not positive I agree with him. Either way, you’re vastly oversimplifying something, apparently just so you can have some reason to look down on the way other people talk.
Yeah, I made a typo. I saw it, but we can’t edit our posts. So sorry.
Why do you think “orgasm” isn’t a verb? Why shouldn’t people use it that way? What’s wrong with doing so?
In my Spanish 1 class, my friend with the last name of Jaramillo was called to the board and wrote, “Rocky’s amigo”. Now that’s some down-home American assimilation, there.
“Disinterested” used instead of “uninterested”. Disinterested is a perfectly good word with a perfectly good meaning, as is uninterested. But they don’t mean the same thing. I fear the battle for disinterested is already lost, since the error is common, even in otherwise good writers.
Two years ago, 90 percent of the English-speaking world suddenly started spelling “lose” and “losing” as “loose” and “loosing.” I’m still trying to figure out how and why that happened. It’s driving me crazy.
This is another pet peeve, so I have been listening carefully. But I’m afraid my observations don’t match yours. Nearly everyone I hear saying “I could care less” says it with exactly the same intonation as they would if they were saying “I couldn’t care less.”
If I heard more people saying, “I COULD care less,” with an eye-roll and a knowing emphasis on the word “could,” then, yeah, it would definitely be sarcasm. But for most people, I think they just haven’t bothered to think about the literal meaning of what they’re saying. I’d consider “I could care less” a kind of lazy spoken error in the same way that “could of” is a lazy written error.