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Comment by n42 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for being pedantic, but the correct term is "could not care less". Otherwise you are suggesting that they do care.

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I've had this conversation a good few times and I quite like "could care less" - to me it implies more choice on the part of the speaker. I COULD care less. I have that capacity. I actively choose not to.

Although this is definitely not how people usually use it.

I've always seen it as a pithy kind of humor, which it seems most other people either miss or disagree with.

"I could care less! (Yet here we are discussing it to death.)" or "They could care less... (less than we do / less than all this discussion suggests they might care)"

^ I think that's essentially how most people use it, mechanically, without thinking about it as much.

When I say it, I usually either mean it that way, or something along the lines of "I could care less! (And I wish I did!)"

"I've had this conversation a good few times and I quite like "could care less" - to me it implies more choice on the part of the speaker. I COULD care less. I have that capacity. I actively choose not to."

That is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

> That is the dumbest thing I have ever read

Please don't post things like this to HN. (Broken windows aren't allowed, even on the bikeshed.)

Is there an example where that would make sense? Not trying to be a jerk, just can't think of one. Whenever I've heard the phrase it's basically meant "Doesn't care at all", a.k.a couldn't care less.

The entire spirit of the phrase is to denote how little someone cares about something. So if you say they could care less, that implies they care a tiny amount about it and CHOOSE to care that much. I don't see how that could ever replace the original phrase and still make sense.

There are ways to justify it, like this, or the way I thought for a while which is that it's sarcastic. But I'm pretty sure it's just a corrupted idiom. People say "could care less" and mean "couldn't care less" but they don't connect the sounds with the meaning anymore. It's turned into an eggcorn.

It is of my opinion that if a word or phrase is logically improper but the meaning is widely understood, then societal acceptance grants it validity.

Edit: This post is receiving a fair amount of downvoting. I would be very interested to hear arguments that are not from my own viewpoint.

I downvoted you because it goes against the way I think. While I accept the basis of solipsism, it's simply not a practical way to live one's life.

However, language is not math, and adhering and enforcing rigid definitions might pave the path to newspeak. So after having thought about it, I regret downvoting you.

I really appreciate your perspective. The internet makes it too easy to "fire and forget." I hadn't even considered my own opinion in the way in which you framed it. Thank you.

"Could care less" is widely understood to mean exactly what we all know it means.

It would be nice if it wasn't.

> It would be nice if it wasn't.

Since you're being pedantic, you might want to go back and change that to "weren't" instead of "wasn't," as it is a hypothetical supposition. (And yet, I agree with you.)

(please no one comment on the comma inside the quotes. I think we're at this awkward point in grammar history where we're seeing a transition from "all punctuation must be inside the quotes" to "sometimes it really really doesn't make sense for the punctuation to be inside the quote, especially if you're not quoting a person saying a full phrase.")

Touche.

(The "punctuation inside / outside quotes" is something I think about in my writing nearly daily. It's nice to know somebody else thinks about it, too.)

I've read that that transition has already occurred in British English.

In any case, I don't hesitate to put the comma outside the quotes if that makes sense to me, though it's not considered correct in American usage (and I'm in the US). This is one point on which I agree with the Brits; now if we could just get them to change -ise back to -ize :-)

https://xkcd.com/1576/

To be even more pedantic the correct term is "apathetic".

The initial usage is correct; credit card companies could care less about customers who pay off their balances every month, because such customers generate negligible revenue and are thus on the whole a nuisance.

If credit card processing fees are so high as to encourage small businesses to refuse payment by credit cards unless the total exceeds a minimum sum, I would hardly call that revenue "negligible." Otherwise, there would be no reason to offer (paltry) "rewards" points.

Not to mention, people who regularly pay off their card in full are more able to spend far more than than their credit limit in a given month.

You're right, of course; I failed to remember that credit card issuers make money on both sides of the transaction. What I should've said is that customers who pay off every month generate negligible interest revenue, which makes them less valuable than those who revolve balances.

"Rewards" points aren't paltry. A good card allows "points" to be redeemed directly for actual cash and 2% to 5% adds up to a nice chunk even on non-extravagant expenditures. It usually exceeds the pay with cash incentive that some firms (gas stations especially) try to entice with -- a rewards card will give you 3% CB for gas. The best rewards are reaped by those that pay their balance as early as possible and have the best credit. Paying your balance in full improves your credit score, since it keeps your debt-to-credit level low.

And it is not true that those that regularly pay can spend more than their credit limit. After years of no balance carrying and numerous cards one accumulates a credit limit that would drain their savings whatever it was ($100ks). Unless you think millionaires are the only ones that pay their balance in full. I somehow managed to pay in full when I earned minimum wage.

CC companies are fine with non-balance carriers, because the conversion rate to balance carriers is quite high. A few of us just don't spend what they don't have.

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