Five Reasons Why Cats are Inferior to Dogs - Page 5 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14320931
People who complain about "could care less" are the most irritating pedants of them all. If you hear someone say, "I've seen worse," you already know that what he's looking at is pretty fucking awful, but mercifully manages to the title of "Worst, Ever." That's the implication. You don't correct them and say, "No, what you meant was 'I've never seen worse," no need to thank me for the English lesson."


The real English lesson is that it's about intonation.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 01207.html

Let's take stress first. Breaking out the caps=stress part of his notation, and using color to reinforce the case information, we have:

i COULDN'T care LESS vs. I could CARE LESS

There are two questions to ask about this. First, is it true? and second, does it have anything to do with sarcasm or irony?

I believe that the answers are "it's partly true, sometimes", and "no, it has nothing to do with sarcasm or irony in any systematic way."

It's partly true because of the following tendencies in speech rhythm:

Pronouns (like "I") are usually unstressed and therefore rhythmically weak
Verbs (like "care") are usually weak, and monosyllabic auxiliaries or modals (like "could") even weaker; in fact the latter are often completely reduced and turned into clitics
Not and contractions involving not usually want to be strong
Alternating rhythmic patterns are preferred
Starting a phrase with multiple weak syllables is avoided (especially in reading isolated sentences)

So for a phrase like "I couldn't care less", a natural pattern is w(eak) s(strong) w(eak) s(strong), which is nicely alternating, allows the pronoun to be weak, the contracted negation to be strong, and the verb care to be weaker than less. This can of course be overidden by contrast ("Kim is worried, but I couldn't care less") and by many other factors.

As for "I could care less", let's put it aside for a minute and look instead at a perfectly normal, unidiomatic, unironic phrase like "I could buy more". A natural stress pattern is "I could BUY MORE" or maybe "I could buy MORE".

Yes, this notation is ill defined. I didn't choose it here -- in another post, maybe we can talk about how to do better. The point here is that could winds up relatively weak, from a rhythmic point of view, and in fact is likely to be completely reduced. The initial pronoun "I" is likely to be rhythmically stronger than could, at least when you're reading the sentence in an artificial context, because of the desire for alternation and the desire to avoid multiple weak syllables at the start of the phrase. In real conversational usage, the pronoun would probably also be very weak, unless it was being used contrastively. The final word more needs to be at least as strong as buy, unless it's weakened by a contrastive structure like "I could MAKE more or I could BUY more).

But "I could BUY MORE" is exactly the stress pattern that Pinker cites for "I could CARE LESS"! That's because the rhythmic options for "I could care less" are exactly the same as they are for "I could buy more", or any other phrase involving similar words in a similar structure. Irony (or "sarcasm") has zip to do with it. There's no "sarcastic stress" or rhythm here.

From
#14320942
My cat and I play food rugby. I try to get out of the kitchen, and she positions herself in front of me unless I have food for her. I go to the side, she goes to the side. I go to the other side, she goes to the other side. The whole time she's like, "meow, meow" and I'm like "you don't want none of this kitty, it's broccoli."

I also figured out that if I hold the red laser pointer really casually with my arms down by my sides, my cat will still chase the red dot.
#14321302
Cats sneak into my kitch and eat leftovers. To reward me for feeding them, they have killed a rat and left it in my hut out front.
#14334338
longknife wrote:By John Hawkins @ Rightwingnews blog

1. Dogs are smarter than cats


No way! It's just that dogs are more easily tempted to prove their intelligence than cats, which do not tend to follow orders because they lack hierarchical thinking. But as a general rule, felines tend to show more intelligence than canides. Though, to be honest, they are probably matched, highlighting in their respective areas.

longknife wrote:2. Dogs love you – cats could care less.


This one is tricky, think about it. What have you done to earn the love of your dog? Nothing at all Dogs will always love you, some will even love you if you mistreat them. This is because dogs are extremely hierarchical and have a strong pack instinct that leads them to serve, be obedient, and in short are programmed to do everything possible to praise the pack leader (in this case their owner). Cats, however, are not programmed for that, but to be independent and to despise hierarchy, making it almost impossible to feel "admiration", however, cats do fall madly in love with their owners, especially after 4 or 5 years when they already have had enough relationship with them. Love showed by cats to their owners, is typically compared to love showed to their own mothers when they are kitties. I can not say that my two dogs love me more than my cat, they may be more expressive and nervous, but definitely my cat loves me more (it's impossible to get rid of her!)

longknife wrote:3. Dogs are better pets.


Dogs make horrible pets! Can't stand waking up in the morning just to watch them pee!!

longknife wrote:4. Dogs are happy and fun. Cats...


Look there's a reason why most internet memes are of cats and not dogs. Cats are obviously funnier

longknife wrote:5. Cats would murder you if they could


Cats can murder you anytime, but they prefer to suck your resources which lead us to think that they are effectively more intelligent than dogs

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