[libraryofbabel]

Much as it may pain you, “could care less” is an established idiom in American English that’s been in use for 70 years, and Webster’s dictionary has a whole page about it: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/could-couldnt-care-l..., in which they say:

> people who go through life expecting informal variant idioms in English to behave logically are setting themselves up for a lifetime of hurt.

[SturgeonsLaw]

I couldn't care less if there's a group of people misusing the phrase, logically "I could care less" means the exact opposite of "I couldn't care less".

The majority of the world is not American, and presumably the majority of Americans don't use the incorrect phrase, so why should the rest of the world cater for a minority within a minority by putting their butchered phrase on equal footing with the correct phrase?

[cortesoft]

And logically, flammable and inflammable mean the exact opposite, but here we are.

[omneity]

Not quite. "in" here as a prefix is not a negation thing but to _do_ something like "en" in "enhance" or "encapsulate". The word's actual latin root is "inflammare" which means to put something _in_ flames. The subject is the one doing the burning and it's transitive.

Flammable on the hand comes from "flammare", which means for something to catch fire, and is intransitive instead, i.e. the subject is the one catching fire.

The actual opposite of inflammable is uninflammable, which I reckon is only in British English at this point and mostly lost in American English.

[forty]

In French we don't have flammable, only _inflammable_ (meaning that it CAN catch fire). And the opposite is _ininflammable_ ^^

Something in flames is "enflammé" (there is the en- prefix ^^).

[gessha]

As I’ve followed the news for many years now, not many things in France are inflammable :D

[karim79]

Contronyms are what you're referring to. Indeed, flammable/inflammable, also sanction/sanction (permit/punish) and other examples such as fast/fast (going quickly/held in place).

Still, I do find "I could care less" to be less of a contronym and more of an "Americanism". I'm quite used to it by now, and shall thereby sanction its use.

[sirsinsalot]

If I make a mistake like this, please correct me. That's one way I can improve. This attitude of just not correcting people is idiotic.

It's on the person receiving the correction or criticism to ignore it if they wish. Not on people to be silent.

[serial_dev]

Like I could care less (but the "like" is silent)

[hackerlight]

It doesn't mean the opposite, though.

For a formal linguistic example, see the concept of compound words. The meaning of the compound word does not equal the meaning of any of the constituent words. Often because the definition of the constituent words has drifted over time while usage of the compound word remained fixed.

You may unilaterally think that's wrong because you wish to impose a set of rules on language that others don't share, but that's not how meaning works. A sentence is just a string of bits. Meaning comes from a shared consensus about how to parse those bits into meaning.

[wlll]

> It doesn't mean the opposite, though.

It does in my English though, and it really really grates when I hear it. Just because a minority of people have started abusing the language doesn't mean I have to go along with it.

> compound words

Compound words like "afternoon" where the two words themselves make sense together? "couldcare" might be a compound word, but "could care" isn't. Plus, if I start to say "after noon" to mean "mid morning" then get pissed off when people call me out on my language butchery then perhaps my minority take and desire to impose it on the rest of the world would make me the person in the wrong.

[delta_p_delta_x]

> You may unilaterally think that's wrong because you wish to impose a set of rules on language that others don't share, but that's not how meaning works.

'A set of rules' is called grammar. It may have arisen organically and out of 'shared consensus' but today languages only make sense when we maintain that grammar.

Imagine if the positions of the words in the above sentence were randomly jumbled up. It'd make no sense at all.

English is somewhat more lax than other languages about grammar (stemming from its extremely wide usage) while still being able to get the point through, but striving for correct grammar should always be a goal, even if 'the point has got through'.

Many other stricter and older Indo-European languages that haven't experienced as many changes as English has, can be machine-parsed like a programming language. Sanskrit and Latin come to mind.

[hackerlight]

> Imagine if the positions of the words in the above sentence were randomly jumbled up.

But "could care less" isn't random. It is an idiom that has the same meaning as "couldn't care less". If you fed it into a LLM it would know what you mean because meaning is created from global context. Meaning is not some kind of programming language where you input the rules of grammar and the definition of each constituent word, and then out pops the meaning of the sentence. It is impossible to derive meaning that way because meaning is constructed by shared consensus about what collections of words mean in different contexts according to common usage.

[delta_p_delta_x]

> But "could care less" isn't random. It is an idiom that has the same meaning as "couldn't care less".

That is what I meant by 'English is lax enough about its grammar that "the point still gets through"'. 'Could care less' being wrong but semantically understood is exactly along the lines of 'could of' being wrong but semantically understood as 'could've', or the frequent confusion between 'their' and 'they're', or even any other confusion between homophones in written text.

Certainly, most Anglophones know enough English to read past these sorts of mistakes and still understand the underlying meaning (i.e. semantics) from context, but they are all incorrect, full stop.

[hackerlight]

> but they are all incorrect, full stop.

I don't agree. Correctness is strictly determined by common usage. You're viewing language through the lens of a software engineer, where there are logical rules and primitives that combine together to construct outputs from inputs. Language isn't logically airtight like this. "Could care less" shouldn't be thought of as three words. Think of it as one single new word with its own meaning that has no necessary connection to the meaning of the constituent parts that make it up. Just like compound words and other idioms.

[Propelloni]

The GP is talking semantics, you are talking syntax. We are failing the language game here.

[mardifoufs]

The majority of the world doesn't speak English, so why care about using correct English at all right? Btw American English is still the most common variant on the internet. More so than British English.

[wlll]

> The majority of the world doesn't speak English

And yet here we are.

To paraphrase David Mitchell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw), the problem is not so much the prevelance of American English, which in a lot of situations makes sense. eg. "sidewalk" makes a lot of sense, perhaps more, than "pavement" for the place that a pedestrian walks at the side of a road. "Parking lot" for a lot of land that is reserved for parking etc. The issue is that "could care less" means the opposite of what people intend them to mean, and they're just expecting the people listening to interpret what they mean.

[skyyler]

Because you knew what they meant and trying to correct them only serves to make you feel good about your own knowledge.

You aren't helping anyone when you correct them on this.

[lmm]

If you understood someone with difficulty, offering a correction is constructive, particularly on the web where editing is often easy.

[o11c]

It costs everyone time and effort to try to decode nonsensical input.

It's a crime against humanity to not correct grammar.

[kalleboo]

Grammar nitpick derails like this one have wasted far more time than anyone saying "I could care less" ever has

[zztop44]

It’s not grammar and it’s not a correction. The phrase “I could care less” has only one meaning and that meaning is “I don’t care”. It is being used correctly.

[pests]

Does it? I decode it instantly and understand the meaning just like I know what a "fishbowl" is. There is no "decoding" or even nonsensical input in this case.

You are just being stubborn and trying to adhere to an outdated standard. Upgrade or get replaced.

[gifvenut]

But you are not everyone.

[Onawa]

I agree. I've learned to not care when people say 'expresso' instead of 'espresso', and 'ex cetera' instead of 'et cetera'. I know what they mean, you know what they mean, and correcting everyone only serves to alienate others.

[petesergeant]

> I've learned to not care when people say 'expresso' instead of 'espresso'

I stopped correcting people on stuff like this 20 years ago, but sadly haven’t been able to stop myself caring :-/ “Expresso” still grates

[skyyler]

A little kindness goes a long way.

[ryanjshaw]

The examples in that article do not actually argue for the point being made (that this has been going on for 70 years):

> His bearing towards male acquaintances, of whom he knew little or nothing and could care less, ...

Here, "could care less" refers to how little he knows about the male acquaintances, and is effectively saying he cares even less than the little he knows. When we see people write "could care less', they don't write it in the same context, at all.

And then:

> It is impossible that he could care less.

This is clearly a different way to write "couldn't care less", and is again not how we see people use the phrase "could care less".

That being said, "could care less" is definitely a thing of the last 10-20 years and is not going anywhere.

[abenga]

One day, this reasoning will formalize the use of "would/could/should of" and I will rage quit English as a language.

[choxi]

Why do they do this instead of just maintaining the correct usage? The redefining of the word “literal” to mean “potentially not literal” really grinds my gears.

[BeFlatXIII]

I enjoy deliberately misinterpreting the nonsense idioms to frustrate their users.