Could Care Less

Correctness nerds locked onto a blog author who dropped "could care less" into his post. One man made a valiant and well-thought stand in favor of this phrase's "wrong version" and his response ended up being the best thing I read that day.

I disagree with almost every single response in this entire thread, so I don’t know where to begin. The use here is idiomatic, as many people have pointed out. The intonation contour of the phrase is completely different than the non-idiomatic usage. I think that those people who say that there is no intonation difference are simply not consciously sensitive enough to intonation to realize that there’s a difference. Another example might illustrate intonation differences more clearly, even though the nature of the difference in the example is different than that in could care less. There is a difference between the intonation of black bird meaning a bird that is black, and black bird meaning a specific type of bird known as a black bird. The former has a relatively flat intonation contour, while the latter has definite stress on the initial word. So, there you go: we have the exact same word mapping to two different referents, but people can somehow distinguish which referent is meant based solely on the intonation contour. (Let’s not get into a discussion of the definition of ‘word’, but it suffices to say that black bird is two orthographic words in both cases, but one lexical item in the latter case and two in the former.) So, the fact that there’s a difference in the intonation of could care less means that listeners can distinguish between the literal and idiomatic uses, and the intended meaning is perfectly clear. As someone else points out, Steven Pinker has happened to analyze this exact phrase in The Language Instinct, and he concludes it comes from a sarcastic interpretation of the original literal meaning. For those of you sitting in your armchairs who don’t agree with his analysis, all I can say is that he’s a highly respected linguist who knows what he’s talking about.

We still say room and board even though board no longer means food. Should we stop using that collocation because it includes an obsolete word? We say a little bird told me even when a little bird did not, in fact, literally tell you something. Furthermore, birds can’t tell anyone anything, because birds can’t talk, so the phrase logically doesn’t make any sense either. But we still use it, because it doesn’t need to be ‘logically’ consistent to communicate meaning. So it doesn’t matter whether could care less ‘logically’ makes sense based on its literal meaning — its literal meaning is not the meaning people ascribe to it when used idiomatically. Even more importantly, though, the surface form of language is not necessarily ‘logical’, simply because it’s so complex under the surface that it’s unintuitive what’s going on. It doesn’t make any everyday sense that subatomic particles exhibit quantum tunneling and entanglement and all sorts of other strange phenomena, because the underlying physics is so ridiculously complicated that it has to be studied in minute detail before a real picture emerges.

Another similarly uninformed objection, along the same lines of reasoning, that I often hear people make is that we ‘should’ eliminate redundancy from language. They say that’s why double negatives and words like irregardless are ‘bad’. But Spanish has double negatives and they’re perfectly grammatical, so what’s wrong with having them? If you use a word like irregardless, everyone understands what you mean perfectly, so what’s wrong with using it? Furthermore, as hackers you should all realize that redundancy is good. Having a multiply redundant array of disks makes sure there’s not a single point of failure, and having multiply redundant backups means that you don’t go down like Ma.gnolia. Speech is a signal, and signals experience loss, attenuation, interference, etc. A word like irregardless — with redundant affixes in it — may very well be far more communicative in noisy environments. Even if the end of the word is cut off, people can still reconstruct or extrapolate what was said. And remember, the point of a word in spoken speech is to communicate. How do you know usage hasn’t shifted to that form, as a preference over regardless, for exactly that reason? The answer is that you really don’t.

There are processes at work in language change that you don’t have any control over by being a nazi or a pedant. The language changes, whether you like where it goes or not. And it’s twelve steps ahead of you, because it’s changing to satisfy or maximize requirements and utility functions that none of us can even begin to understand fully.

Second of all, this isn’t a syntactic issue in the first place, so it’s misleading to call yourself a grammar nazi. The sentence ‘I could care less’ is perfectly syntactically valid. This is purely an issue with the lexicon. And if you’re going to be a lexicon nazi, there are a few things you should know about the lexicon. First, it’s one of the most rich, fluid, and dynamic aspects of the language, and changes the fastest. Trying to keep it ‘pure’ or stop it from changing is not possible. Second, lexical differences are present across a multitude of axes: geographic, socioeconomic, gender, etc. There is no ‘correct’ lexicon, therefore there is nothing for you to ‘correct’ about the way someone else is speaking.

Third, I really don’t like how so many people on HN have a general attitude of anti-authoritarian superiority, but then you get these sort of rambling hypocritical threads where people pounce on perfectly legitimate uses of language. People pounce like that in other places, but it doesn’t bother me so much because it’s not coupled with the anti-authoritarian bent. The kind of prescriptive rules you are discussing are essentially a marker for whether someone has been educated or not. Those who do not have access to education, for whatever reasons, do not learn the prescriptive rules that allow you to write in a manner that sounds educated. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way hillbillies or inner city black kids talk — it is demonstrable that their language follows the same kind of rules as Standard American English, and are just as logical and consistent. It’s ironic because, in certain respects, those dialects are more logical and consistent than SAE. So by making these sort of glib, ad hominen, red herring remarks whenever anyone makes a grammatical ‘error’, you’re really just reinforcing the entire system. Note that I’m not making any value judgment or stance on the existence of a prestige dialect, or on anti-authoritarianism itself; it’s just that I find the combination of the two hypocritical. This entire thread gives me the same feeling I get when you hear Victorian era drawing room discussions about how the savages in Darkest Africa and Oceania and the Orientals have to shown the light about the superiority of ‘correct’ Western culture. In hindsight, those opinions are so black and white as to be laughable, because there is so much nuance involved just in the question of what the words correct or superior even mean.

Hmm, I didn’t realize how much I wrote until I just posted this. If I had a blog I guess this should be a blog post.

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