Yes, Mark, Andrew, & Quinion.com!
Such statements are dripping with irony!
My pet peeves are misuse of
it's (it is) and its...
they're, there, and their...
company's, companies,and companies'...
etc.
College students enter college these days with a large sense of self-esteem, if not
self-importance, but with an ever-diminishing level of literacy and numeracy...and
they could('nt) seem to care less! ;-)
Guess who's grading assignments this morning... ;-)
Jim W.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark D. Lew [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Fri 12-Sep-03 4:03
To: finale list
Cc:
Subject: [Finale] "I could care less" (was Re: Finale Digest, Vol 2, Issue 10)
At 4:13 PM 09/10/03, Andrew Stiller wrote:
>If you really want to know, check out
>http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-ico1.htm,
>from wh. the following is excerpted:
>
>There's a close link between the stress pattern of I could care less
>and the kind that appears in certain sarcastic or self-deprecatory
>phrases that are associated with the Yiddish heritage and
>(especially) New York Jewish speech. Perhaps the best known is I
>should be so lucky!, in which the real sense is often "I have no hope
>of being so lucky", a closely similar stress pattern with the same
>sarcastic inversion of meaning. There's no evidence to suggest that I
>could care less came directly from Yiddish, but the similarity is
>suggestive. There are other American expressions that have a similar
>sarcastic inversion of apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!,
>which usually means "Don't tell me about it, because I know all about
>it already". These may come from similar sources.
Another way of looking at it is that "I could care less" (or "I should be
so lucky", etc.) is a truncation of a disbelieving subjunctive. In other
words, it's short for something like "If I could care less, then I could
fly to the moon", except that the speaker doesn't finish the thought.
Over the years I've come to conclude that about half the people who kvetch
about "I could care less" (which half may or may not include Chuck but
certainly includes my mother...) are so happy to pontificate on how
ignorant it is that they really don't want to hear a logical explanation.
Same goes for those who kvetch about pronouncing "nuclear" like "nucular".
mdl
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