7 ms·

I looked this up, because I was confused about what authority deemed this part of the English language a "grammatical mistake". Meriam Webster notes >Although

• chulk90 12y ago
  The phrase "could care less" has a logic error. It makes more sense for someone to say, "I couldn't care less" when the person wants to express that he doesn't care.
  • brianmcc 12y ago
    In the UK, we pretty much always use the "couldn't" version. I'm guessing "could care less" is an Americanism; it always jars for me when I read it.
    • DanBC 12y ago
      Could care less is very rare in England, although use is growing from Internet usage. There's some suggestion that it comes from Yiddish style dialect. "I should be so lucky!", for another example.
      • kazinator 12y ago
        Both "could care less" and "could not care less" work well in conveying the semantics "I care little". One says, "although I care very little, there is some wiggle room to care even less". The other says, "I care so little, I couldn't care less than I do now". Either way, I care little is the main message. However, "couldn't care less" is more sensible, because what is the point of expressing that you care little, but still have room to care less? That sort of expression would only serve as a retort against an accusation that you do not care. ("A: You don't care at all! B: That is not true, I could care less.") B admits that he or she cares little, but objects to being characterized as entirely uncaring. We should choose the expression based on its logical sensibility, rather than regional dialect.
        • brianmcc 12y ago
          I enjoy your analysis :-) I don't know about "could care less" conveying the semantics - I genuinely paused when I first read it to work out which meaning it had. Let's saying "caring" goes 0 to 10. "Could care less" includes everything from 1 to 10, assuming integer granularity - it's very much the right hand side of the scale, anyway. Only "couldn't care less" covers that 0 rating. So - perhaps it's terrible in conveying semantics and only context/tone imply the disinterest being communicated?
  • teh_klev 12y ago
    Don't get me started on "could care less", my eyes sting when I read that. My other pet hate is "so fun", as in "that was so fun"...I blame those US kids channels for that one.
    • jameshart 12y ago
      Why is 'so fun' so wrong? Fun can usually be substituted freely for a word like 'entertaining'. Is there something wrong with saying "That was so entertaining"?
      • teh_klev 12y ago
        Because "fun" in that context is being used like a countable or mass noun, therefore "That was so much fun" would be the correct usage. "Entertaining" is an adjective and you can use "so" as a modifier to express how entertaining whatever you were doing or watching is or was. This probably explains it better than I can: http://www.grammarphobia.com/qa#a31 http://www.grammarphobia.com/qa#a31
        • jameshart 12y ago
          Fun also functions as an adjective. "That was a fun movie. It was fun. How fun? So fun." I agree, there's definitely two conflicting usages here: and activity can be the noun "fun", in the same way that doing something can be can be "bliss" or "hell" or "a complete waste of everyone's time". And so while I can say "My drive in to work was hell", I can't say "My drive in to work was so hell" (because not an adjective). But if I can say "My drive in to work was enjoyable", and even "My drive in to work was so enjoyable", then what's wrong with saying "My drive in to work was so fun"?
        • jack-r-abbit 12y ago
          I had no idea that fun was not allowed to be an adjective.
      • eridius 12y ago
        I assume the issue is with the construct "so fun", not the word "fun". And in that construct, the word "so" is an intensifier. It emphasizes the nature of the next word. You'll hear it in constructs like "that was so cool", or "that was so awesome", or other such phrases that kids like to say when they're excited about something.
  • kmm 12y ago
    Who cares if it has a "logical error", whatever that even means, if you understand. And I know you understand it. Millions of people use this idiom completely intuitively, following their instincts of language that I, as someone who doesn't have English as their native language, can only be jealous of. "I could care less" is either meant to be taken sarcastically, or it came to be because the "dn't c" consonant cluster is hard to pronounce, the same reason you don't pronounce the 'l' in could, the 'k' in knee, knight or knave, the 'p' in psychologist or pneumonia, or half the letters in Wednesday.
  • tracker1 12y ago
    see: sarcasm
• ewzimm 12y ago
  It is a grammar issue. Words often have common uses that don't make grammatical sense. "Comprised" means "included" or "contained." You wouldn't say that a group was included of four people or that a group was contained of four people. It's semantically backwards. Confusing it with "composed" makes it more difficult for people to understand its meaning when it's used correctly.
• rayiner 12y ago
  It is an issue of grammar. "To comprise" has the same grammatical usage as "to include" although the two words mean subtly different things. You'd never say "the care package is included of cookies and candy bars" and it's equally incorrect to say "the care package is comprised of cookies and candy bars." If you want to imply that the care package has cookies and candy bars, but also may have other things, you say: "the care package includes cookies and candy bars." If you want to imply that the care package has just cookies and candy bars, you say: "the care package comprises cookies and candy bars."
  • vajrabum 12y ago
    It is in fact an issue of grammar. Irregularity is primary feature of human language grammar--a source of delight to some and a source of annoyance to others. One of my favorite examples from language acquisition research is the small child who says "I goed to the store." In this case it's literally the exception that proves the rule.
  • dbbolton 12y ago
    As a linguist, it is absolutely not an issue of grammar. The grammar is 100% correct. Nit-picking over the so-called "correct" definition has nothing to do with grammar. It is an issue of semantics, and a rather arbitrarily prescriptivist one at that. Actually, I'm not even sure I would say it's a semantic issue. Most speakers will easily understand the intended meaning.
    • tantalor 12y ago
      Now we are arguing about the semantics of "grammar". How did we get here? :)
      • pvarangot 12y ago
        By involving a linguist in a discussion about the best way to write something.
        • 12y ago
• aetherson 12y ago
  Well, maybe giraffedata will precipitate a change in language in which it becomes less acceptable again. I don't really understand the impulse people have to say, "Language is constantly in flux and there is no authority on what is correct usage. Thus, you should not try to change people's language and I am the authority telling you this." If you're descriptivist, then one of the things that you should describe is people's bottom-up attempts to change language by, say, excising 47,000 uses of a phrase from a commonly read reference material.
  • viewer5 12y ago
    > If you're descriptivist, then one of the things that you should describe is people's bottom-up attempts to change language by, say, excising 47,000 uses of a phrase from a commonly read reference material. I don't think descriptivists are obliged to treat a one-man crusade on a phrase with the same gloves as the grand-scale evolution of that phrase in the first place. 47,000 instances of "comprised of" across a zillion wikipedia articles written by a bunch of people is evidence of lingual evolution; one guy reverting those all to "comprised" isn't further evolution, that's just one guy changing something he doesn't like.
    • aetherson 12y ago
      Sure. But, you know, when you use evolution metaphors, you get that what starts a change in a species is one mutation, right? Someone first used the phrase "comprised of" in this sense, and that person, it would seem, got some traction. Giraffedata is trying to be the guy who gets traction on making the phrase ungrammatical. This does happen! At some point, we stopped for example using the second-person informal (thou). This didn't happen because the God of Zeitgeist changed the minds of millions of English-speakers all at once. It happened because individual people started to change how they used language, and it caught on. Do I think that giraffedata's crusade is likely to be successful? Nope. But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing."
      • tokenrove 12y ago
• mturmon 12y ago
  Merriam-Webster uses a very permissive standard for grammar compared to most other usage guides. I like them, but you have to be careful following their advice. If you read their words fairly, you will note they say that "comprised of" is rejected by some readers. It's the whole descriptive vs. prescriptive thing, and MW explicitly adopts a descriptive standard (they say so in their preface). A good introduction to this larger question is David Foster Wallace's (excellent) essay in review of Bryan Garner's (fantastic) usage guide (http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...). If you are interested in usage, and are not familiar with Garner's book, I recommend it. (http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-Garner/dp/0195382757 http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-Garner/d...) It is superior to MW for most writers' purposes. (For students of linguistics, MW might win out.) Garner, incidentally, doesn't much like "comprised of" -- http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=2385 http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=2385 (“invariably inferior”).
• curun1r 12y ago
  It's yet another fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what defines correct language usage. English is full of examples where incorrect usage became pervasive enough to become accepted as correct. But some people fight that process because they don't like that the language changes as a result of people using it ignorantly. For me, it really comes down to how you view the purpose of language. If the purpose is to convey meaning as accurately as possible, then these changes devalue the language since the usages that result from ignorant speakers are, by nature, less precise. The oft-cited "begging the question" has a very precise meaning that's difficult to convey in other terms. When ignorant usage widens the meaning, we lose the ability to easily refer to the more narrow meaning. On the other hand, you can view language as a shared cultural identity that's always shifting and evolving organically. In that light, these minutiae are pointless because the majority of speakers don't understand the subtlety and never will. You can try to educate people, but you'll just end up alienating them. As humans, we're evolved to learn language from our environment and the people who talk to us, not from a textbook. So why would we consider the textbook version to be the canonical version? These two viewpoints are diametrically opposed and yet are both reasonable and there are many well-educated people on both sides.
  • eridius 12y ago
    Well said. Though I think that in the context of an online encyclopedia, being precise has far more value than in most other contexts, and so the prescriptivists are in the right. This should be recognizably true even if you take the side of the descriptivists in other contexts.
  • svachalek 12y ago
    I have to say I find myself on both. In general I find the descriptive view of language to be far more flexible, pragmatic, and realistic. But certain phrases such as "all intensive purposes" evoke such a strong response from my gut that I just cannot abide it.
    • tedunangst 12y ago
      Are people defending "all intensive purposes"? I think descriptivists get a bad rap sometimes for "anything goes" but that's not true either. All intensive purposes is clearly a mistake.
• bane 12y ago
  I've found that whenever anybody gets a burr up their ass over some minor grammatical point, they almost never know what they're actually talking about, have not even the most cursory understanding of language or grammar and have instead built some foundation of their identity on a rule they wrote memorized and see anything that goes against that rule as a violation of their self-image.
  • mtviewdave 12y ago
    To some people, fussing over a certain set of grammatical issues is the mark of an educated person. I remember one person who got angry with me when I responded to their lecture on the word "decimate" with a little bit of historical linguistics. Probably because it seemed like I was undermining their self-image. What's interesting to me is which items are in the set of things to be fussed over. Split infinitives, yes. Is-doubling, no. "Decimate", yes. Any other borrowing from Latin, no. It's so arbitrary, yet some people cling to it so fiercely.
    • bane 12y ago
      It can be hard to parse sometimes, people who are educated from people who suffer from severe cases of Dunning–Kruger and have tied their supposed expertise deeply into their persona.
  • mtVessel 12y ago
    *rote ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning
    • bane 12y ago
      ha! you're correct of course.