One can only hope from the latest missives that this venerable but weary thread, too, has finally found peace. 
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
– A.C. Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine
Ferchrissakes. I’ve explained in multiple posts that I’m discussing native speakers, haven’t I? The implication that we should police our idiomatic speech in order to keep from confusing non-native speakers is a new level of ridiculous.
You stated that “no actual person is actually confused by it”. This seemed to exclude the actual persons I referenced. Moreover, if one accepts what seems to be a well-supported contention that the usage is mainly an Americanism, you must be suggesting that British persons are not “native speakers” of the English language. You have a tough hill to climb on that one.
Alas, my hope that this thread was indeed winding its weary way somewhere to the sea appears to have been misplaced.
Was this the best of those many hypotheticals you had in mind? Because I can easily think of better ways to express this same idea, and using “I could care less” in this context seems forced and awkward to me.
So what? I wasn’t asking you about “I could care less” as an idiom. You were making a big deal about how the non-literal use of “I could care less” meant the phrase could no longer be used by those who wished to say that they could, in fact, care less about something, and I wanted to know why you thought this particular phrase was worth preserving. It’s turned out to be surprisingly difficult to get a straight answer out of you.
I don’t know what argument you think you were making, but I do know what you actually said (emphasis added):
Fer, again, chrissakes.
Fine.
Point to wolfpup! Good sirrah, you are victorious! Despite having explained before that I do not think any native speaker is genuinely confused by this phrase, I did indeed neglect to include the “native speaker” qualifier this time around. You, sir, have beaten me! I bow to your superior debating skills.
The idea that Brits are genuinely confused by it is idiotic, though. What evidence do you have to support this claim?
If you want the thread to die down, it’s a simple matter: make your next post consist of a cite to a respected linguist.
I think you’re propagating a bit of a strawman. It’s not necessarily a misHEARING per se, but perhaps a general laziness of some people in repeating the expression. It seems unlikely anyone thought “couldn’t” sounded like “could”, but it certainly makes sense that they might have inadvertently repeated the expression incorrectly. Ever play that “telephone” game, where each person whispers a phrase into the next person’s ear, and what you end up with is very different from the original? Or consider how often people mis-attribute quotes:
Does “Twain” sound like “Warner”? Of course not, but that doesn’t stop people from giving credit to the former. The simple fact is, people often repeat things they heard, and do so inaccurately. It’s simply astounding to me that anyone could doubt that this is possible.
The connection is that some people in this thread seem to find it extremely unlikely (one person even said “impossible”) that the expression could be changed from “I couldn’t care less” to “I could care less” through inadvertence. They seem to believe that there HAD to be a deliberate reason for the change, and that the change improves the expression. So I gave an example of an expression that changed in one part of the country, for no apparent reason.
Honestly, I thought that was pretty obvious, and I’m a bit taken aback that you failed to understand me.
If I ever wrote “mishearing”, then I misspoke. I agree that it seems unlikely the word “could” would sound like “couldn’t”. Hopefully that clears up the confusion. If we can stop substitute the word “inadvertence” for “mishearing”, I think we could stop talking past each other.
Can anyone quote (and source) an example of a respected linguist actually using “could care less”–rather than discussing its use?
If respected linguists, or respected English-users of any stripe, have ever actually used “could care less” to describe their own mental state or the mental state of another person–as opposed to discussing the usage–then we may rest assured that “could care less” is just as Standard as is “couldn’t care less.”
Clearly, quoting other speakers would not count as a personal use of the phrase, no more than does opining about the usage itself. The challenge, therefore, is to come up with a documented example of Pinker, Zwicky, Liberman, or any other respected English-language professional using “could care less” to express their own personal reaction.
This thread’s one and only citation of the use of “could care less” by someone generally respected as a speaker of English, was a link to a Google Books page from a transcription of Bill Clinton’s speeches.* A further challenge for those who believe “could care less” is SE, then: to provide either proof that this is not a transcription error (such as a copy of the speech in Clinton’s handwriting), or to provide other documented instances of Bill Clinton using “could care less” to express his own or another’s feelings.
(If he regularly uses the phrase to convey personal reactions, then of course the appearance of the phrase in the book of speeches gains in credibility. On the other hand, if there are no documented instances of Clinton using the phrase other than the speech-book appearance, then it is reasonable to consider the possibility that its appearance there is the result of an error in transcription.)
Users of a language have a right to know what is considered Standard usage by those who are accorded respect specifically for their expert use of that language. Speakers of a language have a right to know what, at any moment in time, is considered to be an indicator of such language expertise–and what, at any moment in time, is considered to be below the standard.
To assert that this information should be kept from language users–perhaps by means of an assertion that ‘rules are for pedants; rules don’t matter since language is ever-changing**’–surely does the users no favor.
*in post 159.
**It is ever-changing, of course. And “right” and “wrong” are meaningless concepts with regard to usage. But there remains, at any given moment, usage that is Standard: that is, what the acknowledged experts use themselves. And then there is usage that is non-Standard: what the acknowledged experts tell non-experts they shouldn’t worry about, because hey, it’s all good.
The example that leapt to mind as I read this: “for all intensive purposes.” :eek:
I think I have somewhere around here the address of the Office of Acknowledged Experts. When I find it, I’ll get back to you, so you can write them yourself.
How about this excerpt from an interview which aired on September 21, 1998, on an ABC News Special (“Crisis in the Whitehouse”)?
[QUOTE=Bill Clinton]
Well, it would depend upon the facts. I think on the whole, people in the uniformed Secret Service who are working on the gate have no business telling anybody anything about the President’s schedule, just as a general principle. I didn’t mind anybody knowing that she was there, if that’s what you’re saying. I could care less about that. But I think that the schedule itself – these uniformed people – you know, somebody shouldn’t just be able to come up on the street, and because they know who the Secret Service agent is, he says who the President’s with. I don’t think that’s proper.
[/QUOTE]
But I don’t think Clinton’s degree was in Acknowledged Expertise of English.
I can’t quote someone using it, because it’s obviously colloquial and not used in formal writing. However, I can quote a respected linguist–Mark Liberman, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, saying something relevant:
[emphasis added].
If by “standard” you mean “accepted in formal writing,” I disagree: “couldn’t care less” is marginally more acceptable in formal writing, precisely because of the fluttering hands of the grammatical offenderati. But Liberman clearly suggests there’s nothing wrong with its usage in less formal settings; none of the silly arguments raised about how its meaning is confusing or corruptive appear to be persuasive to him.
By the way, there’s a great phrase I ran across while reading about language mavens: selective hyperliteralism. It’s the tendency to be willfully ignorant about the meanings of idioms, but only sometimes. My suspicion is that people don’t start off selectively hyperliteral; rather, they object to specific idioms because doing so is a semiconvincing substitute for actual knowledge about language. When confronted with the spurious nature of their objections, however, that’s when the selective hyperliteralism kicks in.
It is certainly possible, and a valid hypothesis. It’s just not a fact, and I personally don’t find it a satisfying answer. Certainly words and phrases have entered the English language via mishearings, inadvertent changes, false etymologies, etc. I’m just not convinced “I could care less” is an example of one of these.
And why is that?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought you said you’re not convinced that it’s deliberate sarcasm, nor are you convinced it was inadvertent. Would you care to share with us what you think IS the reason for the 2 different versions of the expression?
I have given four different possible mechanisms for the evolution of this phrase; why do you doggedly accept one and dismiss the others, especially those proposed by linguistic experts? Do you actually want to dismiss users of this phrase as ‘morons’? If so, why?
Killing Time, have you studied linguistics? What do you know about the typical ways in which meanings, pronunciations, grammatical patterns, etc. change in languages? Linguists have been studying the typical ways in which the pronunciations of words, grammatical structures, and word meanings change over time for quite a while now. They know a lot about which changes was are very common and which ones are very rare. Learning which changes are most common is not a matter for pure intuition. You have to have actually studied linguistics to be good at this. (Again, the fact that you speak a language doesn’t make you an expert in linguistics.) There have been several possible etymologies for “I could care less” proposed in this thread. None of them are utterly impossible, but a knowledge of linguistics shows that some of them are more probable than others. The fact that one of those proposed etymologies seems to you to be much simpler doesn’t prove anything. Again, something that seems simple to you might seem convoluted to other people. In the case of trying to sort out the possible etymologies for “I could care less,” it’s better to trust the research of linguists rather than your personal feelings about what’s simple.
I’m not set on any one theory. I lean towards it being an ironic subversion of the phrase. I personally think it’s more likely someone originally used the phrase intentionally (or at least repeated it intentionally) and it caught on, versus speakers mishearing the phrase and there becoming a wide-spread idiom catching on without anyone realizing an important negative particle central to the literal meaning is missing.
I can’t completely discount the sarcasm theory, though. I do notice a slightly different stress pattern to the way I say “I could care less” vs a “straight” reading, with extra emphasis on “care” and “less.” That said, it’s not the usual sarcastic tone. Panache45 in post #61 claims that in the 60s, the phrase originally was intoned with sarcasm and dropped this intonation over time. Now, I don’t know how accurate the reporting is, but that reflects more how I’d guess (and remember, we’re all just guessing at this point), the phrase developed: as irony, although not necessarily sarcastic. If we had recorded instances of the phrase being used in speech during the 60s as the phrase transitioned from “I couldn’t care less” to “I could care less” that would give us more data on what the true etymology of the phrase was. Was it straight up sarcasm? Was it just ironic humor? Was it an implied “[as if] I could care less”? Was it simply a mindless mistake repeated? Or was it something else?
Peachy. I thought this had come to a belated close about a page back but apparently not. While the linked article appears to be a blog, the incidence of such garbage that I’ve seen out of The Economist in recent months on several subjects just adds to my conviction that this publication is on a downward spiral to the status of some kind of mendacious tabloid. Or maybe * The Economist* should stick to writing about the economy and not climate science or linguistics.
Not everything in that article is stupid by any means, but some of it is just abject nonsense. So “I’m good” has exactly the same meaning and is just as acceptable as “I’m well” or “I’m fine”, is it? If I say “how are you?” to someone and they reply “I’m good”, I’m tempted to ask them just what it is that they’re good at, and why I should care. Of course it’s a commonly used colloquialism, and it’s even grammatically correct, but it’s not semantically correct. And I have absolutely no objection to someone using it in casual speech, but to defend it as unreservedly correct usage is a different matter entirely, because it does not mean the same thing as the other expressions. This guy writes, if I may scatter idioms around like spring flowers, like someone with a bee in his bonnet or a chip on his shoulder or, as one reader put it, like someone who just quit smoking that morning.
The fact of the matter is that “could care less” isn’t even technically an idiom, it’s a colloquialism – like “y’all” – that is probably largely American or otherwise regional and, like the infamous “could of” and “should of”, its origin may well be a phonetic mistake, but I acknowledge that no one really knows for sure how (or why) it developed or what earthly purpose it serves.
And now, perhaps, this weary river will wind somewhere safe to sea. 
Of course it’s semantically correct. And why on earth would you say “I could care less” isn’t an idiom?