You're the Smartest Guy In The Room ... but please, try to restrain yourself.

edit: This comment also puts me in that category.

"My car broke down, and I could care less!"

"I broke my finger, and I could care less!"

"My girlfriend left me for being so goddamn pedantic all the time, and I could care less!"

The example that always gets me foaming at the mouth is the persistent confusion of "are" and "our" in online forums, just because they sound similar in an American accent.

I'm bothered by people who say "could care less", but I'm bothered even more by people who insist on "correcting" use of the phrase "begging the question". This begs the question, am I a hypocrite?

We still say room and board even though board no longer means food. Should we stop using that collocation because it includes an obsolete word? We say a little bird told me even when a little bird did not, in fact, literally tell you something. Furthermore, birds can’t tell anyone anything, because birds can’t talk, so the phrase logically doesn’t make any sense either. But we still use it, because it doesn’t need to be ‘logically’ consistent to communicate meaning. So it doesn’t matter whether could care less ‘logically’ makes sense based on its literal meaning — its literal meaning is not the meaning people ascribe to it when used idiomatically. Even more importantly, though, the surface form of language is not necessarily ‘logical’, simply because it’s so complex under the surface that it’s unintuitive what’s going on. It doesn’t make any everyday sense that subatomic particles exhibit quantum tunneling and entanglement and all sorts of other strange phenomena, because the underlying physics is so ridiculously complicated that it has to be studied in minute detail before a real picture emerges.

Another similarly uninformed objection, along the same lines of reasoning, that I often hear people make is that we ‘should’ eliminate redundancy from language. They say that’s why double negatives and words like irregardless are ‘bad’. But Spanish has double negatives and they’re perfectly grammatical, so what’s wrong with having them? If you use a word like irregardless, everyone understands what you mean perfectly, so what’s wrong with using it? Furthermore, as hackers you should all realize that redundancy is good. Having a multiply redundant array of disks makes sure there’s not a single point of failure, and having multiply redundant backups means that you don’t go down like Ma.gnolia. Speech is a signal, and signals experience loss, attenuation, interference, etc. A word like irregardless — with redundant affixes in it — may very well be far more communicative in noisy environments. Even if the end of the word is cut off, people can still reconstruct or extrapolate what was said. And remember, the point of a word in spoken speech is to communicate. How do you know usage hasn’t shifted to that form, as a preference over regardless, for exactly that reason? The answer is that you really don’t.

There are processes at work in language change that you don’t have any control over by being a nazi or a pedant. The language changes, whether you like where it goes or not. And it’s twelve steps ahead of you, because it’s changing to satisfy or maximize requirements and utility functions that none of us can even begin to understand fully.

Second of all, this isn’t a syntactic issue in the first place, so it’s misleading to call yourself a grammar nazi. The sentence ‘I could care less’ is perfectly syntactically valid. This is purely an issue with the lexicon. And if you’re going to be a lexicon nazi, there are a few things you should know about the lexicon. First, it’s one of the most rich, fluid, and dynamic aspects of the language, and changes the fastest. Trying to keep it ‘pure’ or stop it from changing is not possible. Second, lexical differences are present across a multitude of axes: geographic, socioeconomic, gender, etc. There is no ‘correct’ lexicon, therefore there is nothing for you to ‘correct’ about the way someone else is speaking.

Third, I really don’t like how so many people on HN have a general attitude of anti-authoritarian superiority, but then you get these sort of rambling hypocritical threads where people pounce on perfectly legitimate uses of language. People pounce like that in other places, but it doesn’t bother me so much because it’s not coupled with the anti-authoritarian bent. The kind of prescriptive rules you are discussing are essentially a marker for whether someone has been educated or not. Those who do not have access to education, for whatever reasons, do not learn the prescriptive rules that allow you to write in a manner that sounds educated. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way hillbillies or inner city black kids talk — it is demonstrable that their language follows the same kind of rules as Standard American English, and are just as logical and consistent. It’s ironic because, in certain respects, those dialects are more logical and consistent than SAE. So by making these sort of glib, ad hominen, red herring remarks whenever anyone makes a grammatical ‘error’, you’re really just reinforcing the entire system. Note that I’m not making any value judgment or stance on the existence of a prestige dialect, or on anti-authoritarianism itself; it’s just that I find the combination of the two hypocritical. This entire thread gives me the same feeling I get when you hear Victorian era drawing room discussions about how the savages in Darkest Africa and Oceania and the Orientals have to shown the light about the superiority of ‘correct’ Western culture. In hindsight, those opinions are so black and white as to be laughable, because there is so much nuance involved just in the question of what the words correct or superior even mean.

Hmm, I didn’t realize how much I wrote until I just posted this. If I had a blog I guess this should be a blog post.

If you mean assuming the premise, can't you just say that? Or if you like lording your immense brain over us inferior beings you can use petitio principii and we'll all bow down to your prowess and learnedness and continue to just call it assumption (or presumption, or where appropriate tautology; take your pick).

That said "I could care less" grates with me but I couldn't care less as I know what was intended by the context.

I agree with your observation of that common mechanism for mangling English, though. The mis-quote you mention is particularly embarrassing to behold.

As others have pointed out: language is meant to be understood. It would be enough to always take the meaning from a speaker, except if we do that chronically, we begin to lose words. Which will make communication more difficult when you need those specialized meanings.

Bother.

3. Use a pair of commas in the middle of a sentence to set off clauses, phrases, and words that are not essential to the meaning of the sentence. Use one comma before to indicate the beginning of the pause and one at the end to indicate the end of the pause.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/607/02/

The period is a part of the quotation itself.

One of my favorite urban dictionary entries:

"(exclamation) Oldcootism used during great consternation or surprise. Used by 1890’s prospectors, cantankerous old farmers, and young people playing old people on TV in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s."

The same article seems to suggest that it has both come into and gone out of fashion over the last few centuries. I feel consoled by the examples given where avoiding the split would introduce potentially different meanings than the one originally intended.

Who else?