Could You Care Less?

Some people are just way too concerned about the proper usage of grammar.  When it comes to grammar rules and whether or not other people follow them correctly, I could care less.

Or couldn’t I?

Let me ask you.  If one person says “who” and another says “whom,” could you care less?  Because if you don’t care, if you think people can speak however they please, then you might just say that you “could care less.”

Well, could you?

Because if you could care less, that implies that you must care a substantial amount about it, or at least high enough on this make-believe scale of caring that you’ve got enough space lower on the scale in which to care even less about the whole damn thing.  So maybe it’s not the most important thing in the world to you, maybe you care about other things more, but you certainly care.  You care whether or not people use “who” or “whom.”

So let’s say one person says “which” and another says “that.”  Could you care less?  Or couldn’t you?  If you don’t care about grammar rules, then of course you couldn’t care less!  You could not possibly care any less than you already care about the damn thing in the first place, which just so happens to be not at all!  You are literally as low as you can go on the imaginary scale of caring.  You could NOT care less.

You see, the idiom in full means “cares so little that you couldn't possibly care less."  So that should clear things up a little.  The phrase originated in Britain in the 1940s and the U.S. adopted it in the 60s, though it is still unclear as to how exactly it was mistranslated.  For our sake, I’d like to hope that we were just being ironic.  Or maybe it was developed after having been taken out of context, such as from the phrase “I could care less, but I'd have to try.”

As far as I’m concerned, if one person says “I could care less” and another says “I couldn’t care less,” well I couldn’t really give a damn.

Or could I?

Well, as it turns out, I guess I do have my grammar pet peeves.  So when it comes to improper grammar usage, I most certainly could give a damn.