'Put your best face forward' / 'I could care less'

[Jonathan Lighter]

My big theory on "I could care less" is that it originated in the sarcastic form, "Like [i.e., "as if"]  I could care less."

  Thanks to the phenomenon that I call "stupidity," the "like" fell away, perhaps because it was felt to be an extraneous syllable that detracted from the forcefulness of the utterance. Like, you know what I mean.

  Am pretty certain that I used to use the "Like..." form in high school, shortly before my own IQ began to deteriorate.

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: 'Put your best face forward' / 'I could care less'
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I've never heard or read "best face forward" till now, Deo gratias.
However, I first heard "I could care less!" from the mouths of members
of the training cadre when I was in Army basic training in 1959. They
used it all the time. E.g. the sergeant in charge of teaching field
first aid opened his lecture by saying:

"You can pay attention or not. [Shouted:] I COULD CARE LESS! In
combat, the dead have to bury te dead, because the living don't have
time to fuck with them!"

However, the reaction of us trainees was the same as that of Damien's
BrE speakers: utterly ungrammatical.

But, once that I had graduated from basic, "I could care less" became
no more common in random speech than, e.g. the word "cadre."
Sometimes, it was used to mock the lifers, but that was about it. In
fact, in my experience, the phrase is still a rarity.

-Wilson


On 2/3/06, Damien Hall wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Damien Hall
> Subject: 'Put your best face forward' / 'I could care less'
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Just a note to say that, at the moment, neither "Put your best face forward" nor
> "I could care less" is current in BrE. We still talk about feet in the first
> case and, in the second, the version without the negative is typically
> nonsensical to a speaker of BrE. If they have heard it at all, they will be
> vaguely aware that it's an American version of "I couldn't care less", but they
> will think that the Americans have got it wrong and aren't talking sense!
> ("Surely, if you could care less, then you *do* care to some extent, maybe even
> a lot?") Of course, this analysis won't be new to members of this list -
> Americans have cited it to me as an acknowledgement that their own expression
> is strange - but I put it here for the record.
>
> Damien Hall
> University of Pennsylvania
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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