[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.

[delta_p_delta_x]

> I don't agree. Correctness is strictly determined by common usage.

Happy to agree to disagree, especially when there is this much teeth-gnashing about how 'correct' this usage is—just within this thread. My point about 'could of' was even brought up elsewhere.

> Language isn't logically airtight like this.

But it is—or at least, people make it so. In a world where what people say or write is regularly misconstrued/misinterpreted and lands them in jail, or persecuted, or even killed, I believe clarity, accuracy, (factual and syntactic) correctness, and honesty should be something that every writer should strive toward. Someone else brought up contronyms—which I believe ought to be avoided as much as possible because of their potential to cause much confusion even with context ('sanction' is a very powerful example).

This sort of wishy-washy 'it is correct because people understand it' only reminds me of 'alternate facts'. I don't like it and I wish people wouldn't put up with it.

[Propelloni]

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