[Ads-l] antedating OED on "could care less"

[Laurence Horn]

Thanks to all for the interesting data antedating “could care less” to the 1940s.  It’s clear that these are the Real McCoy (unlike the 1892 example, which I don’t think is).  As for the proposed derivation, color me skeptical.  You write 'it's not much of a jump from "nobody could care less" to "they could care less.”’  On the contrary, I think of that as a large leap, facilitated only by the fact that we know the jump finished successfully in this (“could care less”) particular competition.  Elsewhere, it’s far less likely.  Is it not much of a jump from “Nobody could solve that problem” to “They could solve that problem”, or from “Few people can speak Basque” to “I can speak Basque”?  And then there’s the relation to squatitives (“They know squat about me” = “They don’t know squat about me”) and other examples in which the presence or absence of negation doesn’t affect the message, including those in which sarcasm clearly plays—or at least played—a role (“That’ll teach you to mess with me” = “That’ll teach you not to mess with me”) and those in which it doesn’t (the case of negative parentheticals, …”I don’t think” = “I think”).  And that’s without getting into this brain injuries that are too trivial to ignore...

Whether or not we buy the sarcasm theory of Pinker and others on “could care less", it’s more complicated than replacing a negative subject with a non-negative one while keeping the meaning constant.  I still mostly go with frozen (dead) sarcasm < “Like/As if I could care less”, but it’s not clear that any one proposed source is entirely convincing.  There’s been a lot of intriguing speculation, though, including by other ADS-listers.  A partial list:

Arnold Zwicky, 2004: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/001256.html
Mark Liberman, 2005: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002253.html
Ben Zimmer, 2009: https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/do-we-care-less-about-could-care-less/
Arika Okrent, 2014: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55388/4-good-reasons-why-people-say-i-could-care-less

The truth is out there, but we may not get there from here, whether or not we could care less.  

LH

> On Mar 9, 2021, at 12:38 PM, Mailbox <mailbox at GRAMMARPHOBIA.COM> wrote:
> 
> The OED's earliest sighting of "could care less" is from 1966, and it's labeled "U.S. colloquial phrase." But my husband and I have found evidence of it in Australia in 1949, clearly used in the modern sense of "could not care less." We found interdatings from earlier in the 60s as well, in editing writing.   
> 
> We report this in an updated post on our blog: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/12/more-about-caring-less.html <https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/12/more-about-caring-less.html>
> 
> A letter written in 1949, and entered into testimony in a divorce court in Perth in 1950, has at least five examples of "I could care less." The letter was excerpted two years later in a news article about the divorce (The Mirror, Perth, June 28, 1952). 
> 
> We didn't include the link to the article, so here it is:  
> 
> https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/75777641?searchTerm=%22could+care+less%22 <https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/75777641?searchTerm=%22could+care+less%22>
> 
> Some of the excerpts we quote:
> 
> "I did love you with all the passion and love that is possible of a man (if you can call me a man in your idea) and now I could care less."  … "But at the present time I could care less." … "I don't care how you take it, I could care less." … "I'm writing how I feel and I could car [sic] less. Goodnight Zoe and goodbye if you wish it—I could care less."
> 
> We've also found "could not care less" from 1892 (OED has only the contracted form, from 1946). 
> 
> Our post ventures to speculate about the development of "could care less." Rather than being ironic, it could be a natural extension of a literal construction in which a negative element ("no one," "none," "few," "nobody,” conditional “if," etc.) appears before “could care less." We give examples, beginning in the 1860s, for British and American uses of this construction: "few men … could care less," "no man could care less," "no one could care less," "nobody could care less," "neither of them could care less," "I don’t believe they could care less," and so on. 
> 
> As we note, it's not much of a jump from "nobody could care less" to "they could care less."
> 
> Pat O’Conner
> 
> 
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org