I was around in the 60s, when the change occurred. Until then, it was simply “I couldn’t care less.” Then, “I could care less” began being used, but always with sarcasm. Over time since then, of course, the sarcasm was left out. But it was definitely there.
This thread offers substantial evidence that it is not “just” a result of thoughtlessness, as several people have stated that for them the usage involves a conscious decision. Isn’t it fun to learn things? I suppose you could contend that it’s “largely” a result of thoughtlessness.
For me it usually a conscious decision. It speaks of a level of apathy so deep that I won’t bother with the tiny oral gymnastics involved in enunciating “couldn’t.”
You may judge me as you wish, but I maintain that those who write “would of” and “could of” have no concept of the original English that they are struggling to express phonetically. It’s no different than “I went back two find you’re hat, and I found too that looked the same, and I didn’t know witch won it was.” Judge that genius. The examples are all over the Internet.
Consistency is good. It may be my misreading of some of your posts, but I detect a certain lack of consistency on your own part. I’m not going to try find the specific posts, especially since you may not actually disagree with my point here, but here’s what I’m thinking of. In our first Great Discussion on this topic, you informed me that English was constantly evolving and, in essence, that my insistence on “correctness” was stupid. But in a more recent thread, in which mistakes in English were being discussed, you said something to the effect that “good writers don’t make those mistakes” – a sentiment that I wholeheartedly agree with. The conclusion being that while English evolves, and sometimes evolves badly, in strange, irrational, and mysterious ways, its evolution is best served by – and its richness largely owed too – writers who actually know how to write, and understand the damn language.
And this is a subject about which I could care less. Much, much less. In fact I feel quite strongly about it.
Well, the original statement was about the verbal use of the phrase, which I see no problem with. Like I said, written out, it slightly (ETA: OK, it’s a little more than slightly, but not more than the misuse of “you’re” for “your” or “then” for “than.” Hell, even I’ll do those in moments of inattention.) irks me, but I judge it more as a mindless spelling error than anything else.
nm. Wrong thread.
Not sure if you’re referring to the “could care less” of the OP or “could of/would of” but I would suggest that origin of both mistakes is the same: namely, a phonetic transcription of what one thought one heard verbally, clearly not understanding what the actual words were that were being spoken, since the meaning of “could care” is exactly the opposite of “couldn’t care”.
We all make typos and other mistakes all the time, including inadvertent substitutions of heterographs (words like “there” and “their”) especially when typing fast, but my anecdotal observations are that these sorts of mistakes tend to be consistent, suggesting that they reflect a basic ignorance of language rather than a “mindless spelling error”. It certainly seems to me that “could care less” is clearly in that category.
I hope that I am consistent to the principle that first and foremost one must understand how language works.
Part of that understanding is that while grammar has firm rules, usage does not. Usage is in constant ferment and professional writers do in fact act as a governor to ensure that the pace of change does not outstrip general understanding.
But no one owns the damn language. I’ll put my admiration of great writing up against anyone on the Dope because I love words; they’re my whole life. That’s not the point. Great writers, even good writers, are not the language and in basic reality don’t really affect the language all that much. Language is and always has been a spoken medium. Those billions of speakers always have far greater influence than the millions of writers. Writers trail change. Every etymologist will tell you that dating from the first written record is normally false, because the change had already appeared earlier, sometimes long before. (Usually, not always: the written language is not the same as the spoken language and some usages are seldom encountered orally.)
We live in a time when a far greater percentage of the population leaves public traces of their language ability than ever before, so it’s not surprising that non-expert users have become particularly noticeable. Yeah, a lot of it is wrong, a lot more is ungainly, and most of it wouldn’t be acceptable in a professional publication. To which I reply: so what? The laments and accusations against the language are exactly the same as 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150 years ago when the amateurs weren’t as visible. And that means that the refutations have been given out in nearly the exact form for over a century. Talk about fighting ignorance!
There’s not just formal language and wrong language. There are a thousand levels of language use, which each having shades of correctness. The language is not deteriorating. You’ll notice nobody here is being corrupted by the people who use language badly, at least by modern standards. We probably all sound like hicks and yahoos compared to the way battles in the London letter-to-the-editor pages used to be waged.
And we probably will sound overformal and pedantic to writers on the mindmelds 50 or 100 years from now when we will be held up as models to aspire to compared to the horrible examples that will be cherrypicked out of the terabytes of contemporary data. But we aren’t. We’re of our time, just as they will be of their time. And that will make them right and us wrong, or, more accurately, irrelevant.
My statement was in regards to the complaint about the “would of”/“would’ve” distinction. In terms of “could care less”/“couldn’t care less,” I personally think it took an idiomatic path not based on a mishearing, but rather either sarcasm initially or a humorous subversion of the phrase (I lean the latter.) It doesn’t matter, as–to me-- “I could care less” is a perfectly idiomatic phrase, if not meant to be taken literally.
I disagree. I don’t believe for a second that these people ever even thought about what they were saying, and now are only claiming the usage is sarcastic in order to be obstinate.
To claim that “I could care less” is sarcasm, makes absolutely no sense, and leads me to believe that those making the claim haven’t the slightest idea what sarcasm is. A sarcastic answer would be something along the lines of “Whoop de doo!”, or “I’m thrilled to death!”, or my favorite line in the movie “Arthur” - “I’ll alert the media.” THOSE are sarcastic answers, because they relate the OPPOSITE of the speaker’s true feelings, i.e. “I don’t care at all, so I’ll pretend that I care a lot.” To say “I COULD care less”, is to say, “I don’t care at all, so I’ll pretend that I possibly might care slightly more than not at all.” That is not sarcasm; it is idiocy.
BRAVO!!! Well played, my friend. NOW I am convinced. Such ironclad logic.
(Now THAT’S sarcasm.)
Right. The point, as you said, is that the error has nothing to do with the person’s speech, which is normal and “correctly” blended. It’s not an error until it’s written, because that’s all it is: a spelling error. (Or you might want to blame it on phonics, because it’s kind of a phonetic transcription.)
Granted, it’s a spelling error that one might correct after analyzing the grammar, but even educated people seldom analyze grammar when they write ordinary texts.
So what? I’ll leave a more detailed analysis to a later time, but just to briefly deal with this little snippet right now… here is “so what?”:
It’s that “wrong”, “ungainly”, and other such modifiers are obfuscating apologies for abuse of language that ultimately leads to the condition that you don’t know what the hell the person is saying, that’s “so what”. So he may as well have just burbled random noise and emphatic gesticulations.
It’s about what I said a long time ago in the other thread about comprehension and the basic purpose of language. “I could care less” means exactly the same thing as “I couldn’t care less”? Wonderful! :rolleyes: Then please educate me as to the meaning of the word “not”, or is the purpose of a negation purely decorative? Or when a teenager informs me that a party was super “bad”, I suppose I am to understand this as the party having been exceptionally good, or what?
I am getting on in years, and when “bad” means the same thing as “good”, and “not” is just a word that can be ignored, then I have to give up trying to read, write, speak, or understand the English language. But since several kind posters elsewhere on SDMB have credited me with being somewhat articulate, I’m going to cling to a faint hope that I won’t have to give up trying to communicate in the English language due to some new paradigm that I’m not understanding.
I agree. We need to expand our conception of “idiom,” beyond the idea of quaint, opaque phrases, and recognize that natural language use is governed by whole chunks a lot more than commonly realized. Thoughtful use of corpora is starting to show this more and more. In English, for example, we have repertoires of multi-word clusters that work as single units to express things like vagueness and approximation (or something like that, and that sort of thing), or to save face or express politeness (I don’t know if, I was going to say) and so on. (See the work of Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter.)
That one doesn’t bother me, because there is at least some meaning behind the usage. A person who doesn’t necessarily follow society’s rules could be called “bad”, and when the rules being broken are considered unjust, then from a counterculture point of view, being “bad” actually becomes a positive thing. It doesn’t just mean “good”; it means good in the sense of breaking the rules, being extreme, or being “on the edge”.
And let’s not even get started on “sick” meaning “good”.:eek:
wolfpup writes:
> . . . “not” is just a word that can be ignored . . .
There are similar things. A common joke that I see on television is for someone to say something like “Oh, Joe is a good driver . . . NOT!” It’s common to use irony in such things. You know perfectly well that in virtually all cases that “not” means what it has always meant. You just have to listen to the intonation and context. I can always hear from the intonation and context what people mean when they say, “I could care less.” I can now figure out jokes on TV like “Oh, Joe is a good driver . . . NOT!” We don’t have to like the changes that have gone on in English, but we can’t stop them.
Absolutely. The mere fact that it often has a different intonation indicates that it is not a simple mishearing, but rather a subversion or evolution of the phrase. I wouldn’t lump it in with grammatical mistakes like ‘would of’, but rather with inversions of meaning like ‘well done, genius’ for someone who is being particularly stupid.
Huh? The joke (and it’s an extremely old joke) is that you are putting “not” at the end of the sentence, where it doesn’t belong, resulting in stringing the person along, leading him to believe you are complimenting him, then dropping the bombshell “NOT” at the last second. It makes perfect sense, as a joke, and doesn’t require any special skills in interpreting intonation and context to understand. That is absolutely nothing like “I could care less”, which is just lazily leaving out the “not” and has nothing to do with the joke.
I hope that the references to “pedants” and “high horses” weren’t directed at me. I tried in my posts to talk in terms of preferences and impressions.
I read somewhere years ago that the idiom “head over heels” originated as the more sensible “heels over head”. The nonsensical version obviously won. I don’t think it is overly prescriptive to say in retrospect that the wrong idiom won, while accepting that it has indeed won. I happily use “head over heels” when it fits and rarely think about its literal meaning. I wouldn’t dream of correcting someone who said “I could care less.” All I was trying to point out, in what I thought was a friendly manner, is that there perhaps ought to be a preference for the version of the idiom that makes literal sense while the two versions coexist.
The short answer is that 99.9% of the time you do indeed understand idioms, because they are a standard part of the language and would not be used if they weren’t understood. Slang is a completely different thing. Slang is typically *intended *to separate out one group from another by altering meaning or inventing terms. If you are not part of that group and you find yourself understanding their slang, then it’s probably old and obsolete and the in group has moved on to a new set of terms.
This is why I keep emphasizing that making claims like this shouts that you do not understand how language works. Idiom is ancient. Slang is ancient. Everybody uses both, although not necessarily the same set of each. The use of a small set of terms in no way impacts on your understanding of the larger language. You can imagine an extreme situation in which you are embedded in a youth street gang and fail to understand their language, but that’s only because they’re deliberately trying not to communicate with you as an outsider. I would bet large sums of money that there are no normal channels of communications you truly don’t understand, and your experience here on the Dope proves that. Trying to make a case from the most extreme outliers negates that case.
“There ought” has zero meaning in usage. Usage is what happens in reality, especially spoken reality. And as a native speaker you adapt yourself to this reality effortlessly, without ever thinking about it. Apparently it’s only when you do think about and come up with a set of rules (or descriptors or preferences) that make no sense outside your head that you go wrong.
I can’t emphasize strongly enough how similar this attitude is to the people who come in and insist that 0.99999… cannot equal 1, because it doesn’t in their heads. Language may not be as formalized from axioms as mathematics but it has structure that is replicated in all languages by all users. There is always idiom, there is always slang, there is always usage evolution, there is always borrowing of terms from other languages, there are always specialized terms entering the language, there is always irrationality. Denying that structure because “there ought” to be a different one will garner pushback.
However, I (and I think most people) would pronounce “would of” and “would’ve” slightly differently. When I’m saying “would’ve” I don’t put a vowel sound between the ‘d’ and the ‘v’ sound, they just run right into each other. If I were to ever say “would of” (and I can’t imagine why those words would ever go together), I would say it with the clear vowel sound.
Here’s a corpus. Look for yourself. When people say “could care less” they receive little if any negative feedback for the use of the phrase. You may personally be using it as a class marker, but that’s not generalizable to the english-speaking public as a whole.