Seems pretty clear I'm concerned with "couldn't care less".

OK bro, you were crystal clear and everyone else lacks reading comprehension.

Ok Bobo you got me.

I could care less is meant to be sarcastic. It's generally said with the wrong inflection though. It should be I COULD care less. Meaning if I tried really hard I can theoretically conceive of a way to care even less than I do now. It's like "Way to go Einstein",which is a phrase never used in a complimentary fashion even though Einstein is a universally understood avatar of genius.


For all "intensive purpose"..... I could care less and I couldn't care less mean the same thing.

Hopefully you now understand why I didn't have a lot to say on "could care less"-- it's boring. Not sure what your problem is though.

And people still do say "couldn't care less" so it's not like it's some hypothetical statement.

And it should be "could care more" because that's completely unambiguous.

You're about a hundred posts too late to the party lol.

It is an interesting an novel point he makes though

Wtf dude? The simple point being made is that people say A when they mean B. A is logically incorrect. B is logically correct. Obviously when discussing this, one needs to say what A means and what B means.

I guess you can have a discussion with yourself about various other ways to use A and/or B, but everyone else is just making the point that people incorrectly use A when the logically correct usage in context is B.

I said in the very beginning that both A and B are flawed. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here though.

That certainly is a possible use of it, but I'd wager that 95%+ of those who use it are not doing so in that way. And 100% of people who I've heard saying it, unless they're truly terrible at delivering sarcasm.



No problem, I was just pointing out that you had taken us off on a weird tangent. The reason it got so long is that you weren't especially clear with anyone that you were doing so.

LOL, no. But at this point I assume you're doing this intentionally, so while I'll respond in case you really are serious, I'll try to keep this very brief and not get sucked into another LB tangent.

"I couldn't care less", in the context discussed, is not at all ambiguous. It tends to be extremely clear when someone says "I couldn't care less" and mean that they don't care. "Could care more" is not even close to the same thing. If I don't care, I could care more. If I care a little, I could care more. If I care quite a bit, I could still care more. "could care more" is very ambiguous.

If you want to continue arguing that point, I'll leave it to others as this is really getting silly and at this point I'm kind of sorry about my part in it.

B is not flawed. It is entirely unambiguous to everyone except, it seems, you. I could come up with any number of fantastical scenarios where most words or phrases have some nonstandard meaning in a contrived context. That doesn't make the standard usage of that word or phrase flawed or ambiguous.

To pick up OK ed's post, I could probably contrive a scenario where "intensive purposes" is correct. That doesn't mean that as used, 100% of the time the user means "intents and purposes" and it doesn't make that phrase flawed or ambiguous.

If ambiguity is the standard then A is equally as effective as B. Just as you say no one would confuse B for anything else, no one would confuse A as well, which is why both are used. But just as A doesn't logically mean what it's intended to mean, neither does B-- which again is why both are flawed.

Ambiguity is not the standard. "I couldn't care less" unequivocally means "I don't care at all" to everyone except you.

All intensive purposes I think is obviously wrong. I could care less has maybe become an idiom on its own despite the literal meaning of the individual words.

You're making ambiguity the standard right there. (although for sure saying it's not the standard then immediately following up with how your preferred version is unambiguous is quite a trick)

People also completely and unequivocally understand what "I could care less" means.

Logic was supposed to be the standard and A and B are both flawed there.

Maybe in the North America. People don't make that mistake in the UK nearly as often in my experience.

I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make any more.

I didn't know there was a British corpus but there is

https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/

A lot smaller apparently than the COCA (100 million words vs 1 billion) but there are 13 hits for your preferred version vs only 2 for the flawed American version-- so it looks like it also isn't used as much in the UK or the sampling might be different as well.

Let me know if anyone is interested in discussing eggcorns. I know many of you are keen to “tow” that line.

Sounds about right, you lot definitely seem to bloviate about 10 times as much.

We could probably trim another 10 mill easy if we deported chez.

I already covered this

Might be a bit of a Sysiphean task if Luckbox is going to drag every single one out for pages with some rather tenuous logic about how either both versions or neither version are right.

Orthography isn't too exciting so no worries there

Ok here is a quiz:

What is the most phonologically complex one syllable word in English? No googling.