From: John Jetmore <jj33@evansville.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet
Subject: [alt.fan.cecil-adams] I could care less
Date: 4 Dec 1997 21:25:01 -0700

Subject: Re: I could care less (Was: Re: franco=italian or frog?) 
From: jlawler@tempest.rs.itd.umich.edu (John M. Lawler)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.cecil-adams

iayork@panix.com (Ian A. York) writes:

>Seriously, I hear more people complaining about "could care less" than I
>hear using it.  Sure, lots of people use it; but it has to be the
>most-complained-about formation in English.  Why complain about c-c-l and
>not about, say, "Head over heels"?  

Because "head over heels" is just a conventional body action metaphor,
whereas "could care less" is a complicated piece of software engineering,
containing a twos-complement irony inverter, a modal probability
generator, and a differential emotional meter, all operating in a strong 
negative field generated by a controlling negative predicate.  Lose
the negative and you reset all the defaults and the software crashes.
Unless you compile it as an idiom, which is what many younger English
speakers have done.  Their predecessors still have to interpret it, and
thus require the negative.

This troubles some English speakers (usually the ones with older software) 
but not others; troubled English speakers then complain to other English
speakers, in a chain reaction. If the troubled speaker happens to complain
to another troublable speaker, another complaint is emitted, and repeated
complaints can trigger recurrences in other contexts.  In environments
enriched with these speakers (for instance, alt.usage.english), or when
the moderator rods are withdrawn (for instance, if the word "Ebonics" or
the phrase "politically correct" enters the discourse), the frequency of
complaint (with concomitant mention) can grow very quickly, easily
swamping actual occurrence rates.

Brutus Force of the Center for Quantitative Syntax estimates that the
minimum negative field required to maintain an adequate level of
negativity for "could care less", and thus forestall a chain reaction, is
on the order of 1100 millihorns, or 7.1 on the Nichter Scale.

For more on Negative Polarity, point your browser at
   http://www.lsa.umich.edu/ling/jlawler/aue/npislands.html