Wouldn’t you be able to tell intentional sarcasm by the enunciation and timing of the words? Sarcasm has a definite pace to it, which helps mark it as such. If someone were saying the phrase sarcastically, the words “care less” would be lengthened: “I could careless!” But I’ve never heard it said that way. It’s always at a quick pace. I don’t believe the story that it started out as sarcasm - I think it started out as repeating a mis-hearing, then the sarcasm part was made up later by people who knew that it didn’t make sense.
By the way, for you people who say “I could care less,” many of your listeners will take this as an indicator that you’re an idiot.
I’ve always taken this mean that it’s an imperative and someone’s trying not to say “you” and using the passive instead. So, “You must not underestimate the importance of this” becomes “The importantance of this can not be underestimated.”
It’s not a UK/US thing. It’s a literate/illiterate speaker.
Illiterate people repeat what they hear or think they hear, without noticing the actual words.
People who say “I could care less” are also likely to say “axe” instead of ask and “eck setera” instead of et cetera.
But that’s exactly my point. It **was **said exactly as you describe, “I could - care - less.” And it was most definitely sarcastic. But since then, the inflection has been lost, along with the sarcasm.
Do you have any data to support this? I speak very well (I think), and don’t mispronounce the words you have used as examples. I had always heard other people use the phrase “I could care less”, so I assumed it was correct. Once someone pointed out to me that the meaning was backwards, I started saying it correctly. Not considering the meaning of the phrase was in no way related to my understanding of how to pronounce certain words.
I’ve always been annoyed when people say “I could care less”. The other thing that really bothers me is “Same Difference”, which is a dumb combination of “same thing” and “no difference”
I agree that idiomatic phrases need not follow logic, but the idea that people think of this as sarcasm is rather far-fetched, I think. I’ll bet the fraction of people who use it sarcastically is the same fraction who use “penultimate” to mean “ultimate” sarcastically (i.e. next to none).
However, the idea that it’s actually the first part of a two-part phrase, and that the elided second part negates the first, is even more far-fetched to me:
That’s like saying, “I’d like to have lunch.” to mean, “I’d like to have lunch, if I were hungry, which I’m not.”
I don’t see any reason to think that this perfectly valid phrase evolved from anything but a mistake.
This is one of the more ignorant things I’ve seen in GQ. The pronunciation of “ask” as “axe” is difference of dialect, not intelligence, speaking in a non-standard dialect has no bearing on one’s intelligence. Not only that, but where in the heck do you get this statistical correlation anyway? Just because you say it’s true doesn’t make it so.
That said, I now purposely used “I could care less” just to piss pedants off. Then again, I’m pedantic about the word “espresso” and it needles me to hear it mispronounced “expresso.” I guess that makes it fair.
I thought penultimate meant next to last, not next to none.
That said, I’ve been wondering since Sunday if Chris Moore from “Project Greenlight” is an idiot or not for saying that the test screening was the “penultimate” moment. He was trying to say that it was really important, but viewed in the context of “the opening weekend is the ultimate moment”, the test screening may very well be the penultimate moment.
I’m with those who think it started as a mistake. However, it could have started as “as if I could care less”, and then got contracted to “I could care less”, thereby reversing the meaning.
One note about “axe/aks” vs “ask.” The original Old English form of the word was actually “aksian.” It was in 15th Century London dialect of English that switched the consonants to form the word “ask.” I’ve certainly seen Middle English texts which use the word “aks” for “ask,” though I can’t remember which ones, so I can’t cite them here.
Other words that have gone through this process of metathesis are “bird” (originally “brid”) and “dirt” (originally “drit.”) Even today, many educated speakers of English will pronounce “pretty” as “purdy.” It’s not a big deal.
Hmm… This is interesting, because the way I’ve always heard it “care” and “less” are exaggerated, with “care” and “less” each having the length of “I could.” The other way to make it sound sarcastic would be to emphasize “could,” as in “I COULD care less…” (…but I don’t.) But this way, I’ve never heard it said. Nor have I really ever heard it said flatly with the same enunciation as the literal “I couldn’t care less.”
Maybe it’s a regional difference, I dunno.
Whatever its origins (sarcasm or simple mishearing), it an English idiom that many Americans use, and it is meant to be taken ironically (regardless of whether the speaker is aware of the irony or not). The phrase “I could care less” as used idiomatically only communicates one idea, and anybody confused about the meaning is being deliberately obtuse. Just like a double negative does NOT make a positive in many colloquial dialects.
Several people asserted that they did not believe anyone used the phrase as deliberate irony. I simply offer a counterproof-by-example. I have always used it as deliberate irony.
I don’t claim that’s how it spread into wide use. I suspect, like many posters in this thread, that most people have simply parroted or elided what they have heard from others. But I dispute the notion that the phrase is, in and of itself, incorrect.
The big difference between “I could care less” and “I’d like to have lunch” is that the former statement is, if taken literally, such an odd thing to say. Under what circumstances would you ever bother to assert your ability to care less than you already do? If someone were to, in the course of a conversation, decide to tell you that they really could care less than they do about the subject of conversation, wouldn’t that strike you as a rather odd assertion?
By contrast, “I’d like to have lunch” is a perfectly natural statement taken on its own. There’s nothing about it that would raise a mental warning flag, “Oh I’ll bet they don’t mean that.”
And, for those people who have asserted that ironic use is possible only if selected words are inflected or emphasized, I would argue that there’s many ways to convey irony. An excessively deadpan delivery woud work as well. And body language can be involved - a quirk of the eyebrow, etc. When I use the phrase it’s usually with a nod and a smile to soften the impact. (In fact, I’d never use this phrase, and seldom attempt irony at all, in written communication because so many of these little clues are unavailable.)
And you would usually get a grin back from me at that, because I would take that as a sign that you recognized my irony and were replying in kind.
I see what you’re saying. However, when I hear “I’ve been worse.” for “I’m good.” I don’t think anything of it. This strikes me as being similar.
Whenever I heard this phrase, which is only every once in a while I admit, it’s “I could care less what you think.” and not the more clearly sarcastic “I could care less what you think.”
But he didn’t, and wasn’t. Or at least it seems to me that he wasn’t recognizing your irony, he was poking fun at your misuse (in his perception) of a much-used idiom.
So now you’re nodding at his clever joke (that he didn’t make; he made a different one) in response to your clever joke (that he didn’t “get”). So it seems to me that 2/3rds of the humor in this exchange, barring explanation, exists only in your head.
But I’m all for self-amusement, so I don’t know where I’m going with this, except to say that he’s probably going to go away thinking that you don’t know that you screwed up the phrase, and you’re going to go away thinking that he knows how clever you are, when he doesn’t, so both of you will have a totally different idea of what just happened in the conversation.
I guess it’s just difficult to find any value in a joke that no one except the teller realizes has been told.