I’m someone who could quite reasonably be described as a language Nazi, but in spite of my pedantry I’m also someone who sees language as alive and evolving. Or at least, I believe there are times to be a pedant and times to be open-minded.
So I was interested to stumble on a debate about the Americanism “I could care less” and other phrases whose apparent self-contradiction — “cheap at half the price” — really gives people the hump!
Plain wrong or subtly clever?
Well I recall that ‘cheap at half the price’ is cockney in its roots — definitely not an Americanism — and is either a mocking inversion of what street sellers would shout (implying it was expensive) or simply means “it would be cheap if it was half the price, so I’m selling it at the proper value”. There’s a glut of great books out there which can mollify even the most immovable language purist – for example, the apparently paradoxical “the exception that proves the rule” makes a lot more sense when you learn that ‘prove’ used to mean ‘test’.
Personally, I’ve always been fond of the US variation “I could care less” (i.e. minus the negative). To my ear it is followed by an ellipsis (…) or a second half to the phrase — as in “I could care less… but I don’t” which is has a more jocular insouciance about it than the tart British equivalent: “I couldn’t care less”.
As remarked here:
“I could care less” is a wonderfully sarcastic Americanism with its roots in New York Yiddish culture. Anyone who would want to see it neutered and stripped of its character by inserting a negative is a boring pedant and an enemy of real, living English.
Indeed. But the comment on Paul’s blog which did chime with me — because I haven’t heard it for years — was mis-placement of the word ‘just’. As in:
“I don’t just want to eat tonight” – implication: I want to do more than eat
“I just don’t want to eat” – implication:my main concern is that I emphatically do not want to eat
In my experience, the former is often used, misleadingly, when the latter is intended.
But unlike a lot of the other examples in my idle web reseearch this afternoon, this isn’t a 21st century, “blame EMOs and iPods for the decline in language standards”, modern phenomenon; I remember that frustrating me from the earliest possible age — particularly when it made it into movie scripts and so on — before I even understood why or developed the obsession I have with language today. It just didn’t sound right.
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December 6th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
This is quite interesting – it approaches the subject from a more fundamental level than just looking at the phrase’s logical content (i.e. ‘descriptivist’ point of view).
Language is sometimes used in a somewhat more complex manner than just communicating logically constructed sets of words. Take, say, virtually all of idiomatic English.
I think it’s a bit like reading, in a strange way. When you look at a sentence on a page, you’re not actually looking at the individual letters and building the words and sentence meaning out of them as you go along. You’re recognising whole words and phrases in one eyeful, and building up meaning from those.
Similarly, with many iodiomatic usages, it’s a waste of time looking for ‘meaning’ at the level of the logical construction – you have to get used to seeing it at the level of the whole phrase: i.e. ‘that whole phrase means this’. Everyone *knows* (and this is the important thing) that “I could care less” means “I couldn’t care less” despite its illogical interior. It’s a black box, really.
You’re right about the ‘just’ thing, above, though. If it introduces ambiguity, then it’s just wrong. But then how long before we get used to hearing that first ‘just’ construction, and automatically start to impute the meaning of the second?
In language, as in any fluid system, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are just floating markers that drift by us as we live our lives.
Oh, and the usual explanation of the “I could care less” phrase I’ve heard is “it’s sarcastic”, but that’s just a bizarre and rather desperate misunderstanding of the mechanics of sarcasm as far as I can see.
December 10th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Surely ‘I couldn’t care less’ means that one cares so little that it would be impossible to care less. ‘I couldn’t care less if I tried’… Also, I’m sure that ‘cheap at half the price’ start life as ‘cheap at twice the price’ but then became a sarcastic way of saying that something was actually very expensive…
December 13th, 2008 at 2:20 am
This reminds me of a particular bugbear of mine, the old “If you think X, you’ve got another thing coming”. It doesn’t make nearly as much sense as the alternative, perhaps grammatically incorrect “… you’ve got another THINK coming”, and the former would seem to be just a mishearing of the latter, yet from my personal experience the former is certainly the more popular – I have seen it in print many times and a simple google search turns up 6 times more results for the phrase with “thing” than with “think”.
Perhaps it is another example of associating meaning at the level of sentences rather than the logical meaning of the words, as Chris describes. I for one always believed the word was “thing” when I was growing up, and never questioned the meaning until I came across the alternative!
December 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Reminds rather of the ’suspension of belief/disbelief’ debate. I like both so much I can’t decide!