"could care less"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Some of the confusion about "brigs" and "stockades," along with "DIs" and
"drill sergeants" and some similar items must come from the mere existence
of the Marine Corps as a kind of halfway point between navy and army
patoises.

Whether a Marine "is" a soldier has been discussed here before.  If I
neglected to cite Bill Clinton then, I'll do it now: "It depends on what you
mean by 'is.'"

JL



On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "could care less"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> FWIW, the first person that I ever heard use "I could care less,"
> after I had been in training perhaps four hours, was our black
> Puerto-Rican barracks sergeant, who had a *very* thick accent. I
> thought first that he merely lacked sufficient command of English to
> realize that he had misspoken. But, within a day or so, it became
> clear that *all* members of the cadre used the phrase minus the
> negation hundreds of times a day each. By contrast, the phrase
> practically doesn't occur "on civvy street" (AFAICR, this was a
> WWII-ish expression, already obsolete by the time of my time) any more
> often than Army "stockade" is correctly used in place of Navy "brig."
> I once saw a reference in the NYT to the "brig" at Fort Leavenworth.
> Would the NYT refer to Broadway as "Hollywood Boulevard"?!
>
> Well, "brig" is at least an improvement over the once *very* popular
> "guardhouse." Until I was actually on guard duty for the first time -
> in the middle of a thunderstorm, scared shitless that my individual
> weapon, muzzle pointed skyward at right shoulder, arms! would call
> down the lightning from the clouds - I had no idea that a "guardhouse"
> was literally a structure in which guards were housed - when not
> actively engaged in taking charge of their posts and and all other
> military property in view - and not a military jail or prison, for
> which "stockade" is the proper term in military jargon.
>
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> wrote:
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> > Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> > Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: "could care less"
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > On May 24, 2009, at 8:04 AM, i wrote:
> >
> >> Wilson's reports having first heard it used in the Army in the late
> >> '50s, and also that none of the recruits in his training company had
> >> heard it before (so that there was much discussion about in the
> >> barracks). Â so it was new *for them* (though it became routine
> >> "military jargon" for them). Â but of course others were using it --
> >> after all, the uses they first heard came from *somewhere*.
> >
> > this is a partial mis-report (i should never rely on my memory).
> > wilson said it was new to *the recruits*, but that for *seasoned
> > soldiers*, it was routinely used as "military jargon".
> >
> > arnold
> >
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