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Shimmin on I Could Care Fewer at 03:26 on 01-08-2014 - link Possibly-interesting thought on a few hours' sleep: I think what we have here is a case of registers of logic, which mildly amuses me. In formal logic, I will take your word that since X is undefined, it follows that it is unbounded. In informal logic, I don't think this is the case,* so that reasoning does not compute, giving way to "there is no lower value of C" as the solution.

This is a very vague equivalent to, for example, the rule that "lend" and "learn" are intrinsically directional verbs in Standard English, whereas in other dialects the direction is provided by context. In both cases, the more formal register defines things more strictly, so there are more deductions you can make - although I appreciate the language version doesn't work so well as I can't think of any great matches off the top of my head.

*while I'm not entitled to define colloquial logic, I would argue that one of its rules is "ignore whatever looks like bollocks". Infinite C looks like bollocks because it would include high values of C, and if C is high then it can decrease, therefore the statement would be false.

But yes, I appreciate that neither of us is very serious!
http://foghawk.livejournal.com/ on I Could Care Fewer at 02:18 on 01-08-2014 - link Your 'literal' interpretation of "couldn't care less" was extremely difficult to follow. Even if we are playing at following the Rules of Logic rather than actual language use, you've interpreted the referent of the "less" in multiple ways (first as 'less than some unspecified specific amount', then as 'less than all conceivable amounts') and not mentioned when you were switching between them, with the result that your "strictly literal" reading was made almost unreadable by, er, the vagueness of the English language.

Frankly, I do think that "couldn't care less" makes logical sense and "could care less" does not. As you've said, the only reasonable interpretation is "couldn't care less [than the amount I actually care]", which assumes (as natural language does) that 'missing' information is implicit in the sentence/context. The "minimum amount of humanly possible caring" is, you know, zero. (I don't think the 'I can't personally care less' interpretation applies: The "couldn't" rather than "can't" makes it a hypothetical; everybody can care zero in some context, and frequently does. The "couldn't" in "couldn't eat any more" is not a true hypothetical, but for politeness, which isn't really comparable.) I guess if you want to you can claim that you can negative care about something, presumably with an opinion in the opposite direction, but that's silly. People don't discuss feelings or investment in that way. Therefore, if you don't care at all, then you say you couldn't care less, because it's impossible to care less than zero. "Could care less" is a useless indicator, because caring has no particular upper bound, but "couldn't care less" isn't, because there is a lower bound.

Do you want to do some silly math? Here's some silly math.
C = [0, ∞)
c ∈ C
~∃x ∈ C : x < c
∀x ∈ C : c ≤ x (c is the lower bound of C)
c = 0 (by definition of C.)
QED.

And yes, of course emphasizing how much you don't care about something reveals investment—investment in getting the other person to stop talking about it!

(FWIW, I'm against prescriptivism, agree with the register discussion, and all that jazz, but I enjoyed the Weird Al song and assumed it was tongue-in-cheek. IME most of the people who care about language enough to get hot under the collar at perceived misuse also care enough to not be prescriptivists, at least past the age of fifteen. I've never seen anybody get into a fight over the Oxford comma who didn't know exactly how silly they were being. Is it different in England, or have I just been lucky?)

[Second posting attempt; please forgive if doubled!]
http://arilou-skiff.livejournal.com/ on I Could Care Fewer at 01:48 on 01-08-2014 - link ""Its" is appalling. I used wrong for a very long time. It still looks wrong to me not to have an apostrophe there. "

I have the same issue. I know it technically but I haven't got it into my backbone yet, so I still have a tendency to get "its" wrong (apostrophes in general in fact)
http://arilou-skiff.livejournal.com/ on I Could Care Fewer at 01:43 on 01-08-2014 - link " "didn't do nothing" means "did something""

My particular dialect of swedish is famous for piling negations onto each other (and they do tend to work like in maths) (well, it's not just piling negations but also a tendency towards understatement)

We can literally say something "Well, this wasn't ungood." (it means it was good)
http://arilou-skiff.livejournal.com/ on I Could Care Fewer at 01:40 on 01-08-2014 - link I have noticed that slang, colloquialisms etc. can be (for me) very difficult to parse (as is the kind of shorthand, or even just typos/spelling errors/mispronounciations that people make in conversation or one the internet)

IE: Me, as someone who has learned english formally and via the American Media Empire, the colloquialisms (or even simple errors that a native speaker would be easily able to parse) can easily throw me off.

I'm reminded of a certain poster on a certain board whose spelling was atrocious, typos everywhere. For most native english-speakers that seemed to just be an annoyance: They'd still parse what he meant perfectly, for me it was much harder and it took quite a bit of time before I could learn to distinguish the typos from the obscure meanings.
Tamara on I Could Care Fewer at 23:37 on 31-07-2014 - link In all seriousness, though I'm actually rather impressed that you admitted that. Even people who aren't shrieking pedants and "grammar" snobs tend to shy away from admitting they ever have real difficulty with the intricacies of formal English.

Huh. I guess it's because English isn't actually my first (or even, by some apparent definitions, my second) language. Which goes to my point that the places where I'm usually aware of the inadequacies of my English, of it not really being fluent, confident, you know, just effortlessly *right* - are exactly not the formal ones, but the slang, colloquialism, regionalisms and so on. My formal language isn't that great per se either - I can hardly follow the debate about could/couldn't - but I actually don't notice it that much. I'm fairly confident that any written work I produce, at any level of formality, is going to be essentially fine. Conversations though...yeah, I'm never entirely sure if I used a word like, off the top of my head, "quid" correctly. Not in its exact dictionary definition, but in the actual meaning I want to get across - is it too informal for the setting? Are there class connotations? etc. I haven't the foggiest.

So, yeah, this attempt to wipe out actual used language is just absurd. These supposed grammar pedants might like to think that when they hear, for example, a bunch of teenagers talking in 'incorrect,' day-to-day language, and one speaking with perfect, precise grammar they'll find the former are lazy and stupid and the latter clever and proper - but what the actual situation would be, and what anyone would actually think, is that one is simply not a 100% fluent English speaker.
Dan H on I Could Care Fewer at 22:55 on 31-07-2014 - link
Slackjaw.gif

It is, I admit, absurd, confusing and difficult to follow. All the things that Proper English should be.

I was inspired by a post on another thread in which somebody asked the question: "Look at it this way, who cares less, somebody who can care less, or somebody who can't care less." To which the answer seemed fairly transparently to be "the one who can care less". The person who is capable of doing something is clearly the one who does it.

That is pleasing - they don't realise it's under their noses all along.

Although thinking about it, one might equally well argue that jargon and technical language exist *outside* Standard English. The word "power", for example, has a whole host of meanings in Standard English, but exactly one meaning in Physics.

If my students tried to use Standard English in their exams, they'd come unstuck very quickly.
Shimmin on I Could Care Fewer at 22:04 on 31-07-2014 - link
"I couldn't care less" is equivalent to the inequality C !< X where X is some undefined level of caring... It follows that C is infinite.

Slackjaw.gif

Which is ironic, since the Language Police also hate jargon with a passion.
That is pleasing - they don't realise it's under their noses all along.

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