I can be a bit of a stickler about language sometimes. We use language to convey thoughts and feelings, opinions and meanings, and I tend to feel that if we want to express ourselves through language and also want the language we use to adequately convey what we mean, then it is best for us to use language correctly or at least appropriately in order to accomplish this.
One of my pet peeves about language use revolves around 'caring' and centres on whether we 'could' or 'couldn't' care less with a specific focus on what we intend to mean when we use a string of language containing some combination of these words. It seems to me that there are those who want to say one thing, but instead use language to say another. When I see people write, or hear people say, "I could care less," my immediate typical response to the meaning of this string of words is twofold. I wonder how much the person actually cares and want to ask, "well, why don't you care less?"
An example of this might be someone who is entirely uninterested in a particular subject, let's say baseball (because I find baseball extremely boring and uninteresting, heh). The wrong way to express this disinterest is to write or say something like, "I could care less about baseball." If you don't care at all about baseball, then what you want to say is "I couldn't care less about baseball." The latter implies that the language user has absolutely no care whatsoever about baseball--that he or she is at the very bottom of the scale that registers one's degree of caring towards, in this instance, baseball. The former implies that it is entirely possible that the language user could have less care on the scale of caring, which actually means there is some degree of caring about baseball.
So, if we want to convey our particular and absolute disinterest in baseball--or anything else--we don't want to say or write that we "could care less," rather, we want to say or write that we "couldn't care less." In other words, if a particular language user wants to be understood as having no care at all for a particular thing--that he or she is at the very bottom of the scale when it comes to his or her amount of caring--then he or she want's to negate all possibility of caring; thus, the language user needs to include the negation in his or her language use, namely, "could not."
Omitting the negation implies that some caring is present, but not to what degree. So, if we "could care less" about a specific thing, then we could actually care quite a lot about this specific thing. Indeed, of all the things we care about, we can always say that we "could care less" about these things and be uttering something true relative to our particular set of cares: it is entirely possible that we could care less about the things we care about the most.
Given this bit of analysis, it might be understandable why I've become accustomed to having my teeth set on edge when I see people use the phrase "could care less" in their employment of language. It has become for me habitual to experience some small amount of annoyance as soon as my eyes scan any text that include the phrase "could care less." So, I was quite surprised and delighted the other day when someone used "could care less" in a way that actually conveyed what he or she meant--that there was absolutely no caring present at all--and it made me do a double take of the sentence and brought a grin to my face. The language user wrote:
No one could care less.
In my entire reading history I am quite sure this is the only occasion I have ever seen someone use the phrase 'could care less' in conjunction with other parts of language to convey what he or she actually meant: there is no amount of caring at all--there is precisely zero caring.
As for the rest of the language users that have no care at all about something, but write or say that they actually do have some degree of care--regardless of how large or small the amount of caring: smarten up. If you don't care at all about something and also desire to accurately convey this to other language users, then, please, use language in a way that actually means what you intend otherwise you might find that people couldn't care less about what it is you are trying to say.
