From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jun 22 2003 - 21:11:43 MDT
At 10:10 AM 6/22/03 -0500, Brian Atkins wrote:
>Don't forget "could care less" vs. "couldn't care less"...
It's an odd one, apparently common only in the US. I was disheartened to
find that the usually admirable Steven Pinker defends it in THE LANGUAGE
INSTINCT (against pretentious mavens and linguistics Nazis). I assume it
marks one of those usages where a vivid image has become fossilized into a
single blurt of sound that conveys a meaning without anyone considering the
components (in the way we usually don't py attention to individual
syllables in words), so part of the string can degrade without anyone
noticing. `I couldn't care less' is a fairly sophisticated idea, after all,
and for most people, I conjecture, `couldncare' elides readily into
`couldcare'.
I realize most people on the list could probably care less. (Hey, that's
weird: nobody would say `couldn't probably care less'; you'd have to shift
the `probably' up to the front).
Damien Broderick
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