Your “authoritative” (har) source aside, I see it is useless to argue with you, since you are already convinced in your belief that ALL changes to language are improvements, and cannot occur accidentally or through misuse.
And sometimes it just changes, not always for the better.
It’s possible, but unlikely. YOU, however, I am quite sure are wrong.
Serious question: when would you ever wish to express the condition literally described by the phrase “I could care less”? I am struggling to imagine a situation where it would be necessary to explain that I could possibly care about something less than I actually did.
You’re putting yourself a little too much into eburacum45’s head there. I don’t see him making either of those arguments, that all changes to language are improvements (I personally think the vast majority are neutral), and certainly misapprehensions about a word or phrase can cause it to shift meaning/change spelling/etc.
As a personal aside, I love languages, and I particularly love English. These little quirks and inconsistencies and idiomatic usages are what make languages fun and interesting to me. I love the regionalisms and non-standard usages, like how in my neighborhood they use “borrow” for “lend” and double negatives are dialectally common. Or how some parts of the US have funny constructions like “The car needs washed,” or how some people pronounce “ax” for “ask” or “nucular” for “nuclear”. Or how my very educated mother-in-law uses “yet” to mean “any more,” in what I assume is some sort of Wisconsonianism. These idiosyncrasies are what gives language color and life. This is not to say I don’t have my own language usage peeves. I certainly do. But I don’t understand the sort of vitriol that gets expressed for idiomatic expressions/colloquialisms like “I could care less” or the hyberbolic/emphatic use of “literally.” They are used across class, race, and education levels. They are clearly understood. Thankfully, it doesn’t really matter what you or I think. Language will move as it wants, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
I could give you all kinds of hypotheticals but I think it detracts from the fact that this hasn’t been my main point; in my view there is a principle involved that would remain valid even if this particular phrase had no use whatsoever (which isn’t the case). And the principle is that words have meaning, and we should be mindful of the fact that when we use words incorrectly out of ignorance or some misguided attempt to be witty or different, unless our knowledge of the language is deep and masterful – and those who have that mastery are few and far between – it doesn’t usually turn out well. We lose clarity, we lose impact, and we ultimately don’t communicate as well.
There is a kind of offensive rudeness, as I said earlier, in requiring our reader or listener to execute mental gymnastics, however minor they may be, to comprehend what we’re saying because we’re too ignorant, lazy, or careless of the principles of the language, or worse, self-absorbed in decorating the language with incompetently constructed vagaries. Of course our language is rich in words, phrases, and idioms that have evolved over time, and the best ones have come from the pens of literary craftsmen who knew what they were doing; the bad ones have sprung out of ignorance and carelessness. I pretty much summarized my position in this post. This is a meaningless phrase that adds absolutely nothing to the semantics, color, or rhythm of the language. There is no discernible reason why the clarity of the original shouldn’t be preferred.
I disagree. I think you either aren’t reading what he wrote, or you have an axe to grind and it’s influencing how you interpret the discussion.
I don’t think you understand what we’re debating here. We’re not debating whether you “like” it or not, we’re debating whether the phrase “I could care less” began as a mistaken iteration of “I couldn’t care less”, or if it began as some sort of heretofore unheard of sarcasm where instead of saying the opposite, i.e. “I care a great deal”, you say some sort of watered down, ambiguous version of the opposite, i.e. “I could care less”. I am simply arguing that it must have began inadvertently, not as a form of sarcasm.
duplicate
Well, not quite (and I did clearly mark off that paragraph as an “aside,” meaning “a remark that is not part of the main topic/discussion,” so I do know what the general thread is about.) There are four theories proposed in this thread and summarized by eburacum45 upthread. I’m not entirely sure why you are laser-focused on only the sarcasm angle. I personally am not sure I buy the sarcasm theory (as proposed by Pinker, and perhaps influenced by phrases like “I should care” or “I should be so lucky”), but I don’t necessarily buy the mishearing theory, either. That is one possible route to the current idiom. I personally don’t feel it’s the most plausible, but I’m open to that possibility.
Part of the reason I’m unconvinced about the mishearing theory is that I can’t think of another instance in English where a “not” or “n’t” was dropped from a phrase and the “sloppy” idiom became the dominant or nearly dominant form. If you are so incredulous about the sarcasm angle, calling it a “heretofore unheard of sarcasm,” why aren’t you equally incredulous about a “heretofore unheard of mishearing and dropping of the negative particle”?
You’ve made at least two posts claiming that there are situations where one might wish to say “I could care less” and have it be taken literally, and even challenged defenders of the idiomatic use of the phrase to explain “what they would say in a situation where they could, in fact, care less.” While I can easily think of situations where I could, in fact, care less – this is obviously true whenever I care at all – I am still unable to come up with even one situation where saying “I could care less” would be clearer, more accurate, or more elegant than simply saying “I care” or possibly “I care a lot” or even “I care too much.”
If you could really give me “all kinds of hypotheticals” then I’d appreciate it if you would take the time to share a few examples.
“I am not particularly obsessed by the fact that so much of the Internet appears to be infested by functional illiterates, but I could care less about it.”
If you want to claim that there are alternative and arguably “clearer, more accurate, or more elegant” ways to say the same thing, I would say the same – with a lot more justification, IMO – about “could care less” as a perverse idiom. What possible purpose does this mutation serve? And I could make the same claim as the linguistic freethinkers here with at least the same credibility that my use of it is entitled to the same license of being “rich and engaging”, with the added merit of actually making sense.
But again, I wasn’t arguing for the value of a particular phrase, but illustrating the principle of why we have a lexicon and rules of usage in the first place – rules which can and do get broken and changed as the language evolves, to be sure, but which should be judged on their merits.
Exapno claims that mistakes don’t follow patterns, and he’s on your side, so there goes your reasoning.
Can you think of any example where the “not” or “n’t” was known to have been dropped intentionally to create a stupid idiom with the same meaning as the original phrase?
Seriously. It baffled me at first when wolfpup challenged me to tell him (?) what I would say if I really could care less about something–of course that’s a trivial challenge. It didn’t even occur to me that he was asking me what I would say if I thought that the non-idiomatic meaning of the words “I could care less” was the best expression of my thoughts, because that would never ever be the best way I could express my feelings.
It’s why the phrase never appears in a non-idiomatic fashion (except of course in the tremulous flutterings of language mavens): without the idiom, it’s a terrible expression.
It’s like asking me what I would say if I really, non-idiomatically, had a potato sitting on my couch that I’d named Bob–how would I express that thought without making people think I lived with a guy named Bob who didn’t exercise? Huh, smart guy?
It’s a ridiculous hypothetical. Nobody in recorded history ever expressed the idea that they could care by saying “I could care less.” No native English speaker in recorded history has been confused by the phrase. Nobody in recorded history has sincerely bemoaned their inability to express their caring by saying, “I could care less.”
There is no reasonable objection to the phrase.
I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot here. I see much, much stranger perversions of English almost every day. I have given examples and I even made a list of them that I have encountered on the internet. Apparently I am wasting my time, though, since people seem to be glossing over what I write. It surprises me not a bit that the word “not” could get dropped for no particular reason. There is an ENTIRE REGION of the US where the words “to be” get dropped from sentences, resulting in phrases that sound bafflingly wrong to the rest of the country, yet are considered perfectly normal sentence construction in this one region. What I find strange is that you would consider such a thing odd at all, when it is entirely commonplace.
Are you of the belief that “My car needs washed” is some form of deliberate saracasm?
I just did. All the linguistic freethinkers here acknowledge that language evolves, and that it does so in wonderful and mysterious ways. And, to reiterate, I could make the same claim as the freethinkers with at least the same credibility that my use of it is entitled to the same license of being “rich and engaging”, with the added merit of actually making sense.
(1) it’s semantically confusing, (2) it’s grammatically incongruous because it’s the converse of a proper and rational expression in common use with which it coexists, and (3) it adds absolutely nothing to the language even in the most charitable judgment. In fact its value to the language is well illustrated by the fact that no one can figure out how or why it ever originated.
Those sound like two distinctly different things, despite the fact that they share the word “should”. The first sounds to me like a typical Yiddish word-order inversion of “Should I care?”, while the second reads to me as a variant of “If only I were so lucky”. One is a question while the other is not. I don’t see how “I could care less” fits EITHER pattern. I hear “I should care?” with an upward inflection at the end. When I hear people say, “I could care less”, there is no such upward inflection. Which is why the proponents of that theory are resorting to ridiculous explanations such as “I lean forward and change my facial expression”. Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me.
You did so only in an attempt to make a lame point, not because you thought it was the best way to express yourself. This is a common tactic of language mavens: they deliberately use, or interpret, a common phrase in a nonstandard way in order to accuse those who use the phrase in the common way of communicating poorly. If you used it in this fashion, you communicated poorly.
Except that if you did it, it wouldn’t make sense to your listeners–and since that would impede communication, your quixotic quest would fail.
None of those are relevant concerns. It may be confusing to a computer, but no actual person is actually confused by it. Idioms aren’t analyzed on a “rational” basis. And if it added nothing to the language, people wouldn’t use it.
That’s a total non sequitur.
This is just a value judgement, which you should recognise as such. For me I’d rather see Tony Soprano say ‘I could care less’ than David Mitchell say ‘I couldn’t care less’, thank you very much.
I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to make here. No, of course not. I don’t see how that’s connected. I also don’t think it’s based on a mishearing, and I don’t think “I could care less” is necessarily based on deliberate sarcasm, either.
Provided that you don’t consider, say, a non-American to be an “actual person”, since I believe the expression is largely American in origin and usage. Or that you don’t consider someone newly speaking English as a second language to be an actual person, either.
They should be when we weigh preferred usages, especially if one interprets “rational” in a broad sense that includes not just being logical, but rationally based preference that also values expressiveness and aesthetics. I don’t see your favored expression having any of those attributes, but as several have said, that’s a value judgment on my part. But I think the evidence is strong that the usage detracts more than it contributes.
Now here we come to the real crux of the matter. That rationalization for usage is obviously false, and not only is it false, but its falseness encapsulates everything I’ve been trying to say about the expression in question, its probable origin, and the undesirability of its use regardless of origin.
There is only one GQ answer to the question how did the phrase “I could care less” develop as an American idiom, and that is nobody knows for sure, but there are at least four theories, exactly what eburancum45 summarized earlier in this thread. If you choose to believe the mishearing one with certainty over all the others, that’s your opinion. That’s not a fact. As I said above, I don’t find it the most satisfying of the explanations. I find it rather implausible, myself, but it’s certainly a valid possible explanation. I can’t say it’s wrong.