Why?
Why would you encourage “Are you ready?” over “Is you ready?”…?
I agree with you and the others who reject the “sarcasm” argument as implausible. Technically, of course, “could care less” does mean the opposite of “couldn’t care less”, but it would be a terrible way to sarcastically express lack of caring as it’s basically rather ambiguous, and that’s the whole problem with it. If it was indeed an intentional original expression and not a mishearing, just exactly what the hell was it supposed to mean? That one’s level of caring was at some intermediate point: it could be more, but it could also be less, or what? I find it jarring to my faculties of comprehension at the same rudimentary level that I would find it jarring to my aesthetic faculties to listen to someone playing a musical instrument badly and hitting wrong notes.
It’s like the sentence “I looked for them, but their not they’re” which my opponents here might argue is “fine communication” because we understand what it means, but it’s jarringly wrong, it’s aesthetically offensive, it requires our comprehension faculties to make compensatory adjustments to understand the meaning (however minor those adjustments might be), and so it’s ultimately poor communication. That is always precisely the problem with bad writing (or bad spoken language): there is extra effort involved in adjusting for the writer’s incompetence or carelessness. Sometimes we might never actually figure out what the writer was trying to say, but just because we can usually manage to wade through it and extract meaning out of the mess does not make it “fine communication”.
“No.” But it’s pretty clearly being used in a literal, non-idiomatic manner there.
Exactly right.
Here’s a 3-second clip of sarcasm being used to communicate the actual opposite of what is said:
(I would have preferred to offer the clip of William Marshall’s sublimely sarcastic “I’m soooooooo scared” from the Video Pirates segment of Amazon Women on the Moon, but the phrase comes at the very end of the 1:58-minute clip. Oh, heck, here it is, anyway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k )
Both these gentlemen, of course, are actually expressing “I am not scared,” though the words they speak are “I’m so scared.” This is an example of the sarcastic use of a phrase that’s opposite in literal meaning from the phrase really intended to be understood.
The literal opposite-in-meaning of “I couldn’t care less” (which means that one cares no amount at all) is “I care some amount.” And that’s not what people intend to convey when they use either the standard English “I couldn’t care less” or the non-standard “I could care less.” What people intend to convey is “I do not care AT ALL.”
So the sarcastic inversion is not “I could care less,” but instead “I care SOOOOOOOO much!” If claimants genuinely were seeking a sarcastic variant of “I couldn’t care less” then they’d use the ‘I care sooooooo much!’ version. “I could care less” simply fails to be a sarcastic opposite of “I couldn’t care less.”
That’s an excellent illustration of the problem with “could care less” being used to mean “couldn’t care less”: the meaning of “could care less” is not as clear and unambiguous as advocates are claiming.
Of course it does. “Could care less” as an idiom is exactly ironic/meaning the opposite of the literal.
Are you kidding? I do this every day in a variety of topics. Let me give you some examples:
“I love you, sweetie!” --said to my daughter about whom, literally speaking, I could in fact care less.
“This game is awesome!” --said about Portal 2, a game about which, literally speaking, I could in fact care less.
“The fucking Republicans in charge of our school systems are a special blend of idiot and ideologue”–said about our educational system, an issue about which, literally speaking, I could in fact care less.
The idea that we’re all pining away for the ability to say “I could care less” about issues we’re passionate about is totally absurd. Do you see this phrase appearing a lot in early 20th century usage, used non-idiomatically, until the Evil Language Destroyers co-opted it?
Geez Louise.
No.
That is to say, the answer would not be “yes” or “no.”
It would be, “What the fuck are you on about?” That questioner would clearly be pursuing a language schoolmarm agenda, and it would be that questioner, not me, incapable of clear communication. Why on earth else would anyone phrase a question in such a legit confusing manner?
Look up “sociolinguistic register” and come back when you understand it. Alternately, persuade me that you’re genuinely interested in fighting your ignorance on the subject, and not trying to make a clever point.
I disagree. Simple, yes. Simplistic, no. You understood his meaning, yet there were numerous egregious spelling errors in the sentence. The point that a reasonable person would take is that there is more to language than simply whether the thought was communicated. Sometimes the most salient point is also the most simple point. You would do well to observe this, as your posts tend to be overly wordy and full of sophistry.
It’s not. You wrongly believe it to be so, but only because you missed the point. He wasn’t claiming that the sentence did not communicate the intended idea. He claimed it DID communicate the idea, but contained atrocious spelling errors. You then wasted two entire posts gleefully explaining how he DID communicate his point - something that was never in dispute.
Uh, huh.
Please note that I’m not claiming that I know for sure what the etymology of the phrase “I could care less” is. There are several competing explanations, and none of them are totally implausible. I’m only saying that you can’t use Occam’s Razor to choose between those alternatives unless you know much more about how language change works. Occam’s Razor assumes that there is a clear standard about what simplicity is. I’m sorry, but you have to be an expert on how language change works before you can say what the simplest path of change is. People think that because they can talk they are experts on language. I’m sorry, but that’s not true. If you want to clearly discuss why .999… equals 1 you have to study some math. If you want to clearly discuss what the most plausible paths of language change are, you have to study some linguistics. You can’t do either one out of pure intuition.
Language does not decay. Language changes. If you want to debate this, start a new thread just on this subject.
No, Occam’s Razor assumes one thing and one thing only: that all other things being equal, the least complicated explanation is the most likely.
Which is the less complicated explanation, that people have simply repeated a mistake, or that there is some highly unusual, undocumented, and heretofore unheard of version of sarcasm that employs some extremely subtle and almost indiscernible “intonation” that transforms an ambiguous expression into a poignant satirical one?
[quote=“Killing_Time, post:187, topic:696622”]
You understood his meaning, yet there were numerous egregious spelling errors in the sentence.
[/QUOTE
You actually think I missed those spelling errors? (I’m loath to call them “errors,” if for no other reason than that they were deliberate, but I’ll use your word choice here).
You actually think I missed that point? You didn’t understand what I said at all.
You still don’t get it. It ONLY communicated his point BECAUSE of the atrocious spelling errors. Without those errors, it would have communicated nothing. He cleverly used unconventional spelling to add a layer of meaning to his post, demonstrating that appropriate spelling is contextual, not absolute.
See, that missing bracket above? THAT is what an error looks like: instead of adding a layer of communication, it’s just sloppy and makes my post harder to read. Sorry about that.
No, Occam’s Razor only works within a system where the rules are defined and it’s possible to say what the simplest application of those rules are. For instance, consider why people had trouble with the new astronomy and physics systems which were developed by Galileo/Kepler/Copernicus/Newton/etc. Some people today act like the fact that educated authorities didn’t instantly adopt that new system as it was proposed shows that the people of that time were hopelessly stupid or stubborn.
On the contrary, there was a clear and useful system of physics and astronomy that was mostly filled in by 300 A.D. It worked for very well for everything that people could observe up to about 1400 A.D. The new system of astronomy was actually more complicated in some ways and only some very complicated astronomical observations showed that the old system gave slightly wrong answers for which the new system gave more accurate ones. Really, until Newton tied everything together with his system of physics which incorporated everything the others had discovered in the three hundred years before that, it was essentially impossible to show that the new physics and astronomy was, on the whole, simpler than the older system.
Read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.
We are not looking for the ‘simplest’ explanation, but the most likely one; and the fact that ‘could’ sounds very different to ‘couldn’t’ seems to me to indicate that a mistake is the most unlikely explanation discussed so far.
The explanations include
1/ Someone ‘misheard’ the word ‘could’ for ‘couldn’t’, and repeated it, then somehow this became part of popular linguistics, despite having a very different meaning to the original phrase.
2/Sarcastic or ironic use of ‘could’, meaning the opposite of the original idiom somehow became popular as an evolved form of the idiom.
3/ The ‘could’ version includes an ellipsis, an unstated portion which reduces the amount of caring to a vanishingly small amount.
4/ Liberman’s intriguing ‘minimal negative’ theory. This phrase expresses a negative, but the negative need not always be expressed in order to retain the sense. As he points out this has happened in other phrases, and in other languages, such as French; ‘pas encore’ means ‘not yet’ not ‘footstep again’.
http://livresplus.com/images/pas_encore_le_bain_350.jpg
Even if this idiom *did *arise from an unlikely mishearing, there is absolutely no reason to condemn its users as ‘morons’; I find this attitude utterly incomprehensible.
‘Could’ has now become a widely spoken idiom, and Liberman has found some evidence to place it ahead of ‘couldn’t’ in the spoken form.
It’s also a mistaken understanding of how natural language works.
Yes. One “moron” repeating something to other “morons” is not how discourse communities work, however much that deluded notion might assuage someone’s self-righteous indignation at a particular turn of phrase.
These two hypotheses are not inconsistent with each other. “Minimal Negative” doesn’t mean that someone literally said, “everyone knows that ‘care less’ means negative implicitly, therefore I can drop the ‘n’t’ and save however many hundredths of a second”. It just means that when people started dropping the ‘n’t’ for whatever reason, other people still knew what they meant, so there was no non-pedantic reason to stop.
I do think the analogy with the growth of “pas” as the negative indicator in French is a little (but not completely) strained. The “pas” change occurred language-wide over a much longer, and the fact that French now requires articles more often means that “pas” meaning “negative” and “un pas” meaning “a step” no longer really compete. To say that the same thing happened in English, but only for a single phrase, where the original is still used and means the same thing, is a bit of a stretch.
I didn’t want to get sucked back into this mess, but guizot put it better and shorter than I would have.
Occam’s Razor does not and never has meant that the simplest explanation is best. First one needs to eliminate all explanations that are clearly impossible. That requires knowledge of what is possible and what is not.
An explanation that requires that a solecism by a moron gets repeated by millions of other morons to the point where it is preferred over a clear expression in standard English without any understanding that it is wrong AND IS USED BY PROFESSIONAL WRITERS IN MAJOR EDITED PUBLICATIONS IN THE SAME WAY is clearly impossible. If that is indeed your claim then you are required to post some evidence that language works in that fashion. Your assertion does not equal evidence.
As for the what would happen if you asked a user question, well, what would happen if you went up to someone who had just said “it’s as cold as hell out there” and asked, “Do you understand what you just said? Don’t you know that the standard depiction of hell is a place of extreme high temperatures and fire? How do you justify inverting that? Are you blindly repeating what some moron got wrong?”
Blather.
And for those of you who should know better, truly embarrassing blather.
By having to insert “literally speaking” in each instance you are exactly proving my point.
Do you understand what a “principle” is?
A great huge deal is being made here out of what was nothing more than a humorous allusion to the fact that I consider one particular etymological explanation to be the most likely one. If the allusion was technically imprecise, well, how deliciously ironic, and I could care less. Although in this particular case, all the suggested explanations are certainly possible; it’s just that some appear strikingly improbable.
So no incorrect usage has ever made its way into the accepted mainstream in the entire history of language?
[quote=“Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, post:190, topic:696622”]
No, YOU still don’t get it. That meaning would not be possible were there not accepted conventions of spelling. If “anything goes” were the rule of the day, and people spelled words phonetically any which way they pleased, then his sentence would not have seemed unusual to you.
The POINT here is that there are rules to language, and there is more to consider than merely “Did he grasp my meaning?” This point was demonstrated very clearly and concisely to you, and you responded with long, overwrought essays that completely miss the point.
You forgot:
I’m a moron and can’t speak English properly.