this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
158 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43954 readers
544 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Saying that they could care less when they mean they couldn't care less.
Like, of course anyone can care less than they currently do.
The way I handle this is to parse them differently. They mean the same thing, but “I couldn’t care less” is sincere and “I could care less” is sarcastic.
Sort of like, “I suppose it’s possible that I could care less about that” reduced to the phrase.
Because both phrases obviously communicate the same meaning, a lack of care, the issue for me isn’t in the understanding but in the parsing. So I had to come up with a way to parse it as sarcasm so it doesn’t bother me.
Like when someone says, “I’ll try and be there” my brain, mildly traumatized by really good English teachers in my youth, screams, “YOU’LL TRY TO BE THERE.” But lately I’ve been making an effort to interpret the “and ” following “try” as an alternate form of the infinitive, since it’s so readily accepted and common in spoken English. We already construct other verbs that way anyway (eg. “I’ll go and do that”).
I…might have a touch of the ‘tism. It wouldn’t surprise me. 😅
I always thought of it as a semi-threat/dismissal. For example, "By your actions I see you don't really care about this serious problem." Then the response, "I could care less." Meaning, it's such a moot point to the person that they could indeed just not care at all about it if necessary.