"kippie" - Buster Keaton

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>>"It got so that I didn't care if school kept or not."
>
>This is an old expression (from 1855 at a glance at N'archive): "not care
>whether school keeps or not" means "not care about anything at all".

Here's a little earlier, 1848, from N'archive (which doesn't always return
the same items for the same inquiry):

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_Independent American and General Advertiser_, Platteville WI, 16 Dec.
1848: p. "9":

<<"I don't care a darn whether school keeps or not," said a vulger [sic]
school boy. Whereupon his more refined companion rebuked him, and rendered
the sentence thus: "It behooveth me not the value of an anathema, whether
the pedagogue presideth at the temple of erudition or not!">>

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... suggesting (to me anyway) that the phrase in question was already
standard at that time.

-- Doug Wilson


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