All I know is some critters is vittles, and some ain’t.
It gets quoted a lot, for sure.
The earliest newspaper mention I found was in the Sikeston, MO, Daily Standard for June 12, 1969, as a joke filler. (Barry Popik, the expert’s expert, also gives 1969 as the first cite.)
It doesn’t see many hits after that until the 1980s, but it was apparently so familiar that columnist Herb Caen called the joke older than he was in 1981. He was 55 at the time.
As usual, the punchline got twisted as it was retold. For some reason several tellers made it the “past pluperfect subjunctive” whose extra beat ruins the cadence. I even saw one that used “pluperfect ablative” which also spoils the meter.
The Ozarks in Arkansas. Any “southern” dialect gets this treatment, as do many ethnic dialects.
There’s a reason so many local dialects wind up getting stamped out, becoming more General American.
I know that if I ever made fun of someone’s accent, they would beat me to within an inch of my life. It doesn’t matter where that accent is spoken. It doesn’t matter how high or low that accent is in terms of income level or social class.
@KarlGauss posted this pun in a thread over 10 years ago:
I explained it a few posts later since I don’t think many understood the pronunciation.
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”- Churchill,
However, there is really no such guideline.
Is there anywhere that people don’t? Accent is arguably the most common way of recognizing and enforcing class distinctions, and one of the easiest to subvert. Just in a US context, we’ve got Southerners consciously losing their accent when they move north so they don’t “sound like a hick,” and Black people learning to “talk White” as common and well-attested examples of people caring about what other people think of their accent.
Then there’s the one about the boy who hated hearing Australian children’s stories at bedtime, culminating in the punchline:
“What did you bring that book I don’t want to be read to out of about Down Under up for?”
This nonsense originated in a group of English pedants, who were mainly scandalized by the growing literacy of the lower classes. They put out a series of books on “proper” usage (that word again) that contained “rules” for the written language. Many of the rules were based on Latin, such as the no splitting infinitives rule. (You literally can’t split an infinitive in Latin, so why they thought they carried over in to English is mysterious. The best explanation is that the upper classes all were taught Latin and Greek, languages considered to be far superior to English.)
These books were immensely popular and influential. For the next century schoolbooks in Britain and America faithfully followed this guidance, well after actual linguists and language experts started calling the nonsense nonsense.
Some people haven’t learned this lesson. We call them prescriptivists. They have notions. Rules can be applied to English usage. Good writing is universal and applies to all situations, even casual writing. Words have fixed meanings and new and altered meanings are allowed only if they’ve around since before the pedants’ births. And on and on and on.
I’m loudly anti-prescriptivist so you can chalk the sarcasm off to my biases. I will only note that books by actual linguists sneer at prescriptivists in the same way, or somewhat more polite ways. They have for decades. Over thirty years ago one of Steven Pinker’s first books explained in detail why “I couldn’t care less” is a perfectly good idiom, but you still find threads on this site that have posters slamming it.
As for some reason this caveat must be repeated with every anti-prescriptive blast, the scorn over their incorrect pedanticism does not mean that descriptivists believe anything goes. The insertion of apostrophes into plurals is still downgraded, e.g. Guidelines for more understandable or readable communications can be extremely helpful. Shouting “proper” and “not proper” is not.
This is the reason why we spell Rhythm instead of Rime. English pedants wanting English to follow latin rules, But when I spell it like it should be (which is listed as an alternate spelling) posters here gave me a hard time.
Yep, same here.
I have said many times here that there are NO “rules” for English. There are several guidebooks, (which do not totally agree) and many follow them. In general, not a bad idea to follow those guidelines- especially if you are working for someone who makes that a rule,
If there is a 'rule" it is- “can nearly every reader understand what you are trying to say?” If yes, then it is okay.
The first time I encountered the word (theatre studies at secondary school - can’t remember the name of the play but it was something a bit like the story of Whistle Down the Wind) - and we all just assumed it was pronounced in the manner of vick-tuals.
But English pronunciation rules are like that, comprising:
- Look at the new word
- Think of an existing word that looks a bit like it
- Try pronouncing it like that
Yes, I noticed it in one of the early Thin Man movies. They said susPECTS.
So how do you pronounce a word you’ve never heard that ends in -ough?
That’s easy! You give it your best shot.
Did you mean to write “I could care less”? Because “I couldn’t care less” is not even really an idiom.
I find it to be…tough. Tuff? Tow?
Are you serious? Yes it is.
I have a guide on how to pronounce both Welsh and french- it is infallible-
Think of how it should be pronounced in english. Then- dont pronounce it like that!
I have heard it fairly often,
I remember my father telling that joke at the dinner table when I was in high school (I graduated in 1967). It is possible that my memory is faulty and that it was a little later, but not very much later.
Just ask Ricky Ricardo.
I think of an idiom as a statement that doesn’t make sense if you take it literally. “I couldn’t care less” can be taken directly at face value, the speaker couldn’t care less about whatever if they tried. “I could care less” doesn’t make sense on its own, you have to understand that it’s sarcastic or an idiom or whatever stupid thing makes that work for people who say it.