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From: iayork@panix.com (Ian A. York)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: "I could(n't) care less"
Date: 9 Dec 1996 20:23:52 -0500

In article <jabrams-ya023480000912961923580001@news.haverford.edu>, Jason Abrams <jabrams@haverford.edu> wrote: >
>Everyone is probably familiar with the term "I could care less", which
>indicates a relative indifference to any given subject. But I learned it
>fifteen years ago as "I couldn't care less", which makes a lot more sense
>logistically. I think it is pretty clear, and I'd rather not explain it,
>but I was just wondering what people think. Will I get hundreds of replies

(1) It's in the alt.usage.english FAQ: Check it out at <http://www.ee.newcastle.edu.au/users/staff/peter/auefaq.html>. To
summarize, the construction about which you complain is probably older than you think it is, and has more well-accepted analogues than you probably realize.

(2) This has come up before on alt.folklore.urban; at that time I posted an article which I append here.

(3) I have to say I'm always a bit suspicious about people who complain about "I could care less." Why? Because it's a fashionable thing to complain about. I've seen, and heard, all kinds of people commenting on it, and yet I've only once seen anyone complain about the equally illogical phrase "head over heels". That makes me suspect that the people who complain about the one, but not the other, are not coming up with their objection themselves: they're hearing it from someone else, and leaping aboard a bandwagon while thinking that it makes them look like a bold, original thinker. I have no idea if this applies to you, but there you go anyway.

Here's my previous article, from perhaps a year or so ago. It was one of many articles in the thread, and the second or third I'd posted on the thread, so it may be a little out of context:

This is from The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. by Stephen Pinker. William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York, 1994. ISBN 0-688-12141-1

(From the back sleeve: Stephen Pinker is professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. His research in visual cognition and child language acquisition earned him the Distinguished Early Career Award and the McCandless Young Developmental Psychology award, and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences.)

----------------------p. 377----------------------

A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools of the trade for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: The expression _I could care less_. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying _I couldn't care less_. If they could care less than they do, that means they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced:

   COULDN'T care               I
                  LE                     CARE 
i                   ESS.                         LE
                                 could             ESS.

The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's _sarcastic_. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, "Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world I could care less about."

Hope this helps.

Ian

      Ian York   (iayork@panix.com)  <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
      "-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
       very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England