I could care less

I could. And if I did, this post wouldn’t be necessary, because then I couldn’t care less. And that’s what this is about.

I heard it this morning, on a radio report about the Washington, DC Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza filling with smoke. Close to 80 persons were treated for smoke inhaltion. One passenger died. It happened quickly, with no warning. Or, rather, with little warning, for one passenger in the station did smell the smoke moments before it billowed from the subway tunnel, and he tried to alert a Metro employee, “who looked at me as if he could care less.”

“As if he could care less.” On the face of it, the passenger is telling us that the Metro attendant did display some interest. He cared, because we are told that hecould have cared less. Obviously, he showed some level of concern. Only, that isn’t what this passenger meant. He meant that the Metro attendant showed no concern. He wasn’t interested in what the passenger told him about smelling smoke. “He couldn’thave cared less.

You and I both know this. We’ve heard the phrase uttered a hundred times, and always with the intended meaning of something like, this clown showed absolutely no interest! I’m guilty of saying it myself, even though I know that its meaning is really the opposite of what I intend. Why do we do this?

I don’t think we’re all just very stupid. What we are doing is imitating what we’ve always heard. There must have been a someone, somewhere, sometime who first uttered it that way, and it just caught on. That someone was doing what came naturally. That is, he was making a slight adjustment to the phrase to make it easier to pronounce. Think about it. Say both of them under your breath, and you’ll immediately see that “as if he couldn’t care less” is slightly more awkward to utter than “as if he could care less.” It’s got something to do with that extra unstressed syllable, the “n’t”, that impedes the speech just enough to make the alternative phrase more attractive.

In linguistic terms, this phenomenon is akin to prefix assimilation. It also resembles its opposite, dissimilation, as well as aphesis, apheresis, and metathesis, all of which are attempts to make the unpronounceable pronounceable. Fascinating stuff, if you’re into such things. Or maybe you could care less.