Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
It's used either as a shorthand for "couldn't care less"... or simply as sarcasm.
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This is how it started, I believe, but I think at this point people just repeat the phrase as idiom and don't worry about the literal meaning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
Not all do. Whenever I've used that expression, I say "couldn't care less". You often hear people say "could care less" simply out of ignorance, much as when I hear or see people use the expression "for all intensive purposes". If you try to correct them, "do you mean 'for all intents and purposes'?", the likely reaction is a blank look.
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That one drives me nuts. There are some other phrases like that -- phrases that sound vaguely like another over-used phrase, but make no sense -- but I am mercifully unable to recall any of them right now.
Another one is "beg the question" which doesn't mean what most people think it does. I tracked it down to a conflation between the historical "beg the question" (dating back at least to ancient Greek) and "beget the question" from the mid 1800's (if I recall correctly).
With the "I" and "me" mixup, are we talking about "Susie and me went to the store"/"Joe went to the store with Susie and I"? That's another one that is very irritating. I only correct my kids on that one, though. (And they have the quite reasonable excuse that their first language -- Mandarin Chinese -- doesn't distinguish between subject and object pronouns. I've completely given up on correcting "who" vs. "whom" with them for that reason.)
I also hate this sort of thing -- saw this on a sign outside a car wash today: "Mom's love clean cars!" Now, this could be corrected in a number of ways, including a sort of telegraphic headline like "Mom's love: Clean cars!" But my money is on the more common confusion between the possessive and the plural.
Oddly, I can be more forgiving of there/their/they're and to/too/two, especially in international forum websites.
