Language fails that make you angry

FreeMitya

-None of them "are" and neither of them "are". "None" literally means "not one" and "neither" means "not the one nor the other". My friends laughed at me for saying this. Luckily, I had my OED in my backpack and got the last laugh.

-After getting into the habit of not ending sentences with prepositions, people doing the opposite has started to annoy me. People mixing up pronouns gets on my nerves as well. However, doing these when speaking is more excusable than doing them when writing.

-Using words incorrectly, obviously.

Our beautiful language is precious and needs to be defended!

Jimmy Snyder

Frankly my dear, I could care less.

Fredrik

Why? Just to irritate people?

FreeMitya

I'm a perfectionist. To me, rules are rules, and I will follow them to the best of my ability. Note that I usually won't obnoxiously correct someone unless I'm deliberately trying to irritate a family member or a close friend. It is just a fairly minor annoyance.

turbo

I get peeved when people can't manage to use "less" and "fewer" correctly. It's not rocket-surgery! This is a common error in our local newspaper, so apparently the editors haven't a clue.

ImaLooser

I read a history book that mentioned "they were loosing the battle."

ImaLooser

Do Detroit ads still talk about "lugjury" cars? Spewacious.

Jimmy Snyder

It seems to have affected you very deeply.

russ_watters

I doubt it. I don't think I have ever seen any variant other than "your" used incorrectly. I'm pretty sure that means "your" is substituted for all similar uses.

Andre

My pants are looser too.

Curious3141

You may disagree, but that source you sited is hardly what I would call authoritative.

First of all, the quote from the American Heritage Dictionary (which is the only part of that page that I would pay heed to) did not decry the use of "could care less". It merely stated that the two versions are being used more or less equally. Hardly a denouncement. Stating that they are antonyms (when taken literally) is neither here nor there. At no point was the use of "could care less" explicitly discouraged.

Furthermore, that guy himself is confused. This part in bold, for instance :

is just plain muddled nonsense. The literal opposite of "I could care less" is not "I could care more" but "I couldn't care less". That perfectly fits what he seems to consider to be acceptable as irony.

The rest of the article pretty much just states an opinion (about the impact of the alternative phrasing). Opinions don't mean squat (by which, of course, I ironically intended to mean that they *do* mean squat).

One of the linked references is far more even-handed in its treatment: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm This paragraph pretty much sums up all that need be said on the subject:

There may be aspects to language that we personally object to, but the fact remains that English is a living, thriving language that is constantly evolving. We get to split infinitives and use "who" and "whom" interchangeably in speech - things that would've blanched the faces of the literati barely a century ago. Heck, I don't like the American spelling of many words (which makes it especially ironic that I'm defending an idiosyncrasy of American origin here), but I accept that these spellings have become mainstream.

Jimmy Snyder

No. The literal opposite of "I could care less" is "I could not care less".

Curious3141

Again, this is just your opinion. There are many expressions in common usage that don't withstand literal logical scrutiny, but we use them anyway. Even the phrasing you prefer, "I couldn't care less", is strictly illogical because it's almost vanishingly unlikely that the speaker is being accurate about caring less about the topic of conversation than *anything else* in the entire Universe. For one thing, there are many things that the speaker is actually not consciously considering at the time. It's easy to make the argument that by expressing a strong opinion, even a disdainful one, about the subject under discussion, the speaker is showing he cares more about the subject than all those things he's not consciously thinking about right then.

So the statement is inaccurate if taken literally. But we accept it because it's just another trope - in this case, it's obvious hyperbole.

Now which speaker sounds silly?

Curious3141

"Couldn't" is just a contraction of the same. Duh. I was going for pithiness, which is why I didn't bother to explain that.

Curious3141

Essentially yes. But even if someone uttering the phrase hasn't consciously reflected on the semantic structure (which is a fool's errand in any case, as I explained), it doesn't change the fact that most people understand exactly what is intended. And that's really the point of language - communication.

ImaLooser

Yeah. I think it started watching the Smothers Brothers. The tattoo artists tells Pat Paulsen, "there you go buddy! Born Too Loose."

Jimmy Snyder

What's the opposite of "I could have less than two living biological parents."