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.htmlLet'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
“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.”
-Dom Helder Camara