“I Could Care Less”
This is one phrase that has bothered me my entire life. People seem to think it’s a good way to say you don’t care about something, but that’s certainly not the case. As much as I try to explain to people that it makes no sense, they usually just don’t get it. I’m going to try and explain to you why this is a silly phrase.
We’ll have to consider what it would mean to quantify the level to which you care about something. Let us define a measurement, C, which is a whole number between 0 and 100 representing how much you care about something. On this scale, a 0 would represent you not caring at all, whereas a 100 would represent the most important thing in the world to you.
Now let’s examine the phrase “I could care less.”
This means: there exists a value of C less that the value for which I currently care.
So now we should consider what possibilities exist for your value of C, given this constraint.
If, for example, we are talking about something very dear to you, with a C-value of 100, we can ask the question, could you care less?
Well of course you could: it could be a 99, it could be a 10, hell, it could be a 0, but it’s not, it’s a 100. In fact, there are 100 possibilities of C values for which the statement “I could care less” holds (0 through 99 inclusive).
How about something you don’t care as much for, a 20.
Well there are many possibilities for this as well, 20 to be precise (0 through 20 inclusive).
In fact, the only possibility excluded is zero, because when you have a C value of 0, there does not exist any C value below that. You could NOT care less.
The number line below sums up all the possible C values satisfying the constraint:
As you can see, this statement really does not do much to clarify the level to which you care about something. All it is saying is that it is not the case that you do not care at all, which is the opposite of the message people are trying to convey.
Which brings me to the way to correct this huge logical error. All you have to do is add an “n’t” to the end of the word “could” forming “couldn’t”.
Under this model, a C-value of 100 does not satisfy the constraint, because there are several other C’s that are below 100. The only possibility is 0, because there does not exist any C less than 0.
So there you have it; you’re all idiots.
And before you think you’re clever by responding “I could care less,” you might as well just tell me that you peel the stickers off your rubik’s cube, because I’ve heard it before.
kev. i couldn’t care less.