For bitching about language pedantry, other posters' language, and language in general

The BBQ Pit
281

I personally only use the “couldn’t” form and consider the other to be parroted nonsense. I’m just speculating on how parroted nonsense proved popular.

I suppose we can say that Gresham’s Law applies to anything taking a moment’s thought. If there’s a way to make it lazier or dumber, the public will seek that out like a bloodhound and cling to it tightly.

Minion: But LSLGuy, the peasants are revolting!
LSLGuy: I know. [Spoken nasally with a broad “o” while ostentatiously gazing down one’s schnoz at the stinky multitude in the courtyard.]

282

Watch out or @Pleonast will blast you for daring to use a pejorative in the Pit! I just got an earful about it! :smiley:

283

I believe Google Ngram as evidence for written communication usage. I do not believe it reflects casual spoken communication or is evidence one way or the other regarding it.

And you really miss the point. Even if it is not more preferred the idea is the same: why has a become a competitive variant with staying power? Why do even a sizable minority prefer it? My problem with Pinker in this regard would be if he presents the hypothesis without any evidence to back it up. If so then it is just another just so story.

284

And there’s the rub - if you’re saying how little you care, you’re unlikely to place much stress on any particular word, because that would make it sound like you care at least somewhat. Hence “I couldn’t care less!” (which sounds so insistent! and earnest!) got elided down to “I could care less” (which sounds appropriately blasé and apathetic, logic be damned).

285

Correct, but the written language is the only definitive record we have. Spoken language that consists of somebody mumbling something and someone else who may or may not hear it correctly is inherently messy and ambiguous and doesn’t reliably tell us much about which variant is being used.

How about because the speaker fails to enunciate clearly (as others have already suggested) and/or the listener mishears, and the listener then propagates this variant by repeating it? Why do you feel the need to reject out of hand the simplest possible explanation, and in the process accuse me of “missing the point”?

And it’s not clear that a sizable minority are actually expressing a preference for it, as opposed to just unthinkingly repeating something they thought they heard.

286

It’s the simple explanation. But the fake etymology is often the next step. People who continue using it this way when they know better need a reason that works for them, even if that isn’t why it originally came about.

Like, if you hear someone say “nip it in the butt.” That was almost certainly a mishearing/missaying of “nip it in the bud,” cutting the metaphorical flower off before it can bloom. But I guarantee you a lot of people think it came from a metaphorical kid who you spank.

I know I did.

287

I would be annoyed if someone took this as an opportunity to correct the phrase. Both are essentially equivalent from context. Trying to correct the phrase can often be disruptive when the meaning is easily understood. For instance, in a thread about how to stop network security breaches, someone might say “Good passwords are a way to nip it in the butt.”. But then if someone jumps in with how the phrase is “… in the bud”, then the thread devolves into a bunch of back and forth about the correct phrase, why people thought one or the other was right, all the variations people have heard, etc. Whatever useful and meaningful discussion was happening before is lost because of someone being unnecessarily pedantic.

288

A better tactic would be to say “Did you know it was originally ‘nip it in the bud’?”

289

Or, the dim bulb who misheard the saying can take the opportunity to learn something rather than presenting a vigorous defense of “excuse me while I kiss this guy.”

290

Which is pretty much what I posited, right?

291

You emphasised the wrong word. To denote sarcasm it would be “could”, not “care” that would be stressed. I think wolfpup was just basically disagreeing that the phenomenon of sarcastic stressing even exists. I haven’t heard it very much, if at all.

292

Disagree, in that one can’t pack nearly as much sarcastic sneering into “could” as into a drawn-out emphasized “care”. Try saying both out loud and you’ll see what I mean. Including the mouth-shape involved in saying “care”.

293

The fact that you interpret what I am saying as rejecting that is the solid evidence of your missing the point. Yeah, “butterfly” was a malaprop of the original “flutterby” but those who say “butterfly” are not morons, and there are likely reasons why “butterfly” won out. “Buckeroo” was a mishear or missaid of “vaquero” … so on.

294

The most plausible theory I’ve seen for “could care less” is “negation by association” - the same reason you hear people say “I could give a damn” when they mean they couldn’t give a damn:

Like could care less, give a damn is a Negative Polarity Item, that is, a phrase that is ordinarily used only within the scope of semantic negation of some kind (not, never, only, rarely, few, etc.). Hence the perceived strangeness of They could give a damn, which has no overt negative, but means the same thing as the same phrase with a negative. I.e, the business manager was saying that his members couldn’t give a damn.

Give a damn is a member of the open Minimal Direct Object class of NPI’s, like lift a finger, drink a drop, do a thing, eat a bite, etc. The implication of all of them is that, if one can’t even Verb a Minimal Direct Object, why, then, one couldn’t Verb any Direct Object at all. Thus it’s an idiomatic intensification of a negative. But it does usually require a negative to intensify.

However, there apparently is such a thing as negation by association. Like what happened to French pas from ne…pas, which is now usable as a negative in its own right, from long association in the discontinuous morpheme with the overt negative ne, give a damn and could care less have, in American usage at least, come to have their own quasi-independent negative force.

More at: Language Log: Negation by Association

295

I only ever have used the proper form, but with a bit of lateral thinking, the “improper” form could be considered accurate.

“I [probably] could care less, but doing so would involve more effort than I’m prepared to devote to the project..”

I like the mental contortions parsing that are likely to involve. :smiling_face_with_horns:

296

(Bolding mine) Then basic math would suggest that exactly zero percent of people are of exactly average intelligence. That strikes me as unlikely.

297

Very interesting analysis, thanks for posting. It hasn’t done a thing to change my dislike of the “could care less” construction, despite the explicatory exertions of some of the quoted linguists, especially John Lawler, but it’s an undeniably plausible explanation about how something that probably started as a mistake has endured even if its promulgators never quite understood why.

Two side comments stood out for me. One was the statement that “This makes a lot more sense than Pinker’s sarcastic teenage intonation theory.” I fully agree – it definitely does. I always thought Pinker was way off base on this.

But the other was the statement that George W Bush was one of those of the “I could care less” persuasion. Really? This is your endorsement? I think GWB is one of the strongest arguments for my position on the importance of standard English. Just a small sampling of the language evolution this linguistic genius has bestowed upon the world, celebrated, I’m sure, by descriptivists all over:

“You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” —Townsend, Tennessee, February 21, 2001

“They misunderestimated me.” —Bentonville, Arkansas, November 6, 2000

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.” —LaCrosse, Wisconsin, October 18, 2000

“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” —Greater Nashua, New Hampshire, January 27, 2000

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” —Florence, South Carolina, January 11, 2000

“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.” —Saginaw, Michigan, September 29, 2000

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” —Washington, D.C., August 5, 2004

298

That’s exactly what basic math says about any attribute of a population that is continuous rather than discrete. The “average” might be a fractional number with arbitrary large precision (like 99.34576453980… forever) and there is precisely zero probability of any individual having exactly that number. If the average is the mean, that is.

If there are an odd number of people in the population (say 7,694,521,803) then the 3,847,260,902nd person in the ranking is exactly the median, if that is what “average” means.

Actually if it is discrete it’s very unlikely for a large population as well. Suppose that “intelligence” is not only measurable, it’s measurable in whole points. An individual can have an intelligence level (let’s call it IQ) of 105 or 93, but not 97.35. The mean, median and mode for billions of people will all be non integers values and no one can be “exactly average”

299

[wrong thread]

300

But were the people who misheard and propagated the changes academics? Because I have it on good authority that only academics can make meaningful changes to language.