Perhaps the difference of opinion is the difference between what may have already happened and the directions that some of us are advocating in the interests of improving the language rather than degrading it.
Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that some idiot will conflate “I doubt it” with “I don’t believe it” and come up with the imagined more powerful rendition “I don’t doubt it” which is now supposed to mean “I really, really don’t believe it”? Do you really doubt that this is possible? Because this is how some of the confusing bullshit in our language did, in fact, evolve. I myself can’t say, because I don’t know nothing.
I don’t suppose it’s at all meaningful that this is a GQ thread with 120 posts and one side of it has yet to give a single cite in favor of their position.
Turns out that the same corpus that shows the acceptance of “could care less” shows that usages like “their are” occurs hardly at all Google Ngram Viewer: their are,there are
Of course it is. You communicated several layered ideas to me just now:
You disagree with me.
You think that deliberate unconventional spelling is gonna faze me (an error I’ll forgive, since you probably don’t know I teach third graders and cannot therefore be fazed by any spelling whatsoever).
You believe that orthography and grammar are synonymous, or at least analogous, in contravention of all reason.
You think that you just made a valid point by confusing these two distinct fields.
You think you’re funny.
I don’t know of any more efficient way you could have communicated all these ideas. However mistaken your understanding of the subject, you iz indeed a grate comunikator.
Edit: just in case you can’t follow the breadcrumbs, while your sentence is a fine example of communication, it’s a terrible example of standard orthography and is culturally inappropriate in most formal settings.
The position that “could care less” is not sarcastic but a stupid statement by stupid people who have no idea what they are saying and are creating an idiom that is utterly unlike all other idioms in the language.
Not at all. It was just a simple way of illustrating the fact that a commonly agreed, consistent system of symbolic representation is analogous to lexical semantics and many other important components of human communication. When you corrupt any of the established protocols of communication, then you impair the communication process. Period. While I know that this invites condemnations of “prescriptivist”, there is no greater fan of creative writing than myself. In this uniquely human and creative process, creative license must be allowed. But this is far removed from the idea that ignorant mistakes should be permissible or tolerated, let alone championed.
I will have you know that I have documented instances of readers put into life-threatening situations by my writing, mostly involving snorking coffee through their noses.
I was thinking about this sentence on my drive home, and the more I think about it, the more it delights me.
Cleaned up of its muddy thinking and general intellectual incoherence, it advances a debatable claim. Putting that claim in the most charitable light, it is this: conventional spelling is a necessary ingredient of good written communication.
If that claim is true, of course, then the sentence itself communicates poorly, and would exemplify good communication better if its spelling were conventional.
But consider if instead, wolfpup had posted:
By that logic, this sentence is a fine example of communication, too.
With conventional spelling, the claim disappears entirely; indeed, the sentence would be a baffling response to my post. In other words, the sentence only works if the spelling is unconventional–wrong, if you prefer.
The sentence, in its reliance on unconventional spelling in order to communicate its claim effectively, provides an elegant counterexample to its own claim.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a claim whose form so effectively undermines itself. It’s pretty cool, really.
Wow!! This is either whoosh – or somehow we’re just not understanding each other.
My point was that the bad spelling I exemplified is no different than bad lexical semantics. And that such language transgressions are all the worse when they’re somehow supposed to convey a new meaning that is the exact opposite of a previous meaning, mainly because the speakers are idiots. This is exactly how the English language develops ambiguities and inconsistencies. It’s not how it develops its richness of expression – that is mostly due to good writers who are knowledgeable craftsmen of the language. Which is why my point is that we need to keep fighting instances of obvious ignorance in the use of the language.
Well, exactly. My point is that your “bad” spelling was actually the only spelling possible that you could use and still make your point: in this context, it was good spelling. What you would call “good” spelling would have been completely inappropriate in this context.
In other words, what’s good and what’s bad is not only not an objective thing, but it’s not even universal. It depends entirely on context: what you’re trying to communicate, to whom.
I’d say the technicality of word function versus the acceptance of directive speaks for itself. I could care less as not being the direct term encapiculates the tone giving the meaning to the standard
> 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 disagree. I think they are very comparable. They’re both part of a phenomenon in English (and presumably other languages, but I can’t speak to them) we might call Negative Suspension. This is when you hold off making the statement negative until the very end. This can be done either by actually saying the “not” (or some other negative word) only at the end or by having it by understood from context only at the end. “I could care less” originated by people saying it with an intonation that implied that they meant the exact opposite. Suppose someone asks you, “Do you think this shirt looks good on me?” and you say, “Oh, yeah, you look absolutely stunning” purely jokingly. The point of what you say is to make them think at first that you are saying something complementary and only at the end have them realize that you’re joking. It’s possible to hold off letting the hearer know that it’s a sick joke until the end of an entire essay. That’s the point of the famous essay “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift (and some readers didn’t get the point that it was satirical when it was published). All of these examples are very much like “Joe is a good driver . . . NOT!”
What’s happened in the case of “I could care less” is than the phrase has frozen so that it’s no longer necessary to indicate by intonation that it means the exact opposite. There was a thread by someone years ago in which he discussed the fact that he can no longer use “Brilliant!” except as a joke telling someone that something is really stupid. So it’s possible in a language for a “not” understood only in context to be frozen in meaning and to no longer be necessary to say.
This is not a contest, but an attempt to dispel ignorance; most of the ignorance seems to be on the side of those who doggedly believe that this idiom is due to a mishearing. If it were a mishearing then it would not have a different intonation; case closed.
That is correct. As I said, Pinker made his analysis of the intonation back in 1994; since that time the intonation may have changed to approach that of the ‘couldn’t’ version more closely.
I suppose that is to be expected, since it probably takes more effort to vocalise a sarcastic tone (and on the internet, there is no intonation at all, of course).
Killing time, do you realize other people are trying to have a reasoned conversation here? If you can’t participate, you might do yourself some good by reading along. Dispel some of that ignorance and all.
