[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
yeah, when will people figure out that if you "could care less" THEN YOU CARE!!!!
its "couldn't". I dont know why but it annoys the hell outta me.
[/ QUOTE ]
It's meant to be sarcastic. Moran.
[/ QUOTE ]
Ive never believed anyone saying "I could care less" was trying to be scarcastic. Theyre just parroting back a phrase they heard incorrectly.
Sarcasm is the perfect ad-hoc excuse to prevent sounding like a [censored].
[/ QUOTE ]
I could care less what you believe. (joke).
Don't take it from me, take it from
World Wide Words.
[ QUOTE ]
Attempts to be logical about "I could care less fail". Taken literally, if one could care less, then one must care at least a little, which is obviously the opposite of what is meant. It is so clearly logical nonsense that to condemn it for being so (as some commentators have done) misses the point. The intent is obviously sarcastic—the speaker is really saying, “As if there was something in the world that I care less about”.
However, this doesn’t explain how it came about in the first place. Something caused the negative to vanish even while the original form of the expression was still very much in vogue and available for comparison. Stephen Pinker, in The Language Instinct, points out that the pattern of intonation in the two versions is very different.
There’s a close link between the stress pattern of I could care less and the kind that appears in certain sarcastic or self-deprecatory phrases that are associated with the Yiddish heritage and (especially) New York Jewish speech. Perhaps the best known is I should be so lucky!, in which the real sense is often “I have no hope of being so lucky”, a closely similar stress pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning. There’s no evidence to suggest that I could care less came directly from Yiddish, but the similarity is suggestive. There are other American expressions that have a similar sarcastic inversion of apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!, which usually means “Don’t tell me about it, because I know all about it already”. These may come from similar sources.
So it’s actually a very interesting linguistic development. But it is still regarded as slangy, and also has some social class stigma attached. And because it is hard to be sarcastic in writing, it loses its force when put on paper and just ends up looking stupid. In such cases, the older form, while still rather colloquial, at least will communicate your meaning—at least to those who really could care less.
[/ QUOTE ]
The vituperativeness of your criticism seems to me to lend credibility to the author's claim of social stigma.