David Mitchell's Soapbox
14 HN mentions · mentioned in 14 months, 2010–2025
3:24 · 3.9M views · May 20, 2010
A three-minute David Mitchell's Soapbox rant addressed to Americans about the phrase "could care less", arguing it means the opposite of what speakers intend. Delivered as dry British comic commentary on language usage.
HN uses it as the go-to link, often jokingly, whenever someone writes "could care less" instead of "couldn't care less".
14 comments from Hacker News
> I could care less, ... I don't want to be "that guy" and I'm not trying to be a grammar Nazi. I know this is now an idiom in the USA, and therefore it doesn't have to make sense. However ... I've now heard it said, in four different countries, that this phrase makes the speaker sound like an idiot. I know it's now just "the norm" in the USA, but I wanted to let people here know that saying this makes a bad impression. If you don't care how you sound to non USAians then don't bother. But if you're wondering what I'm talking about, David Mitchell does an excellent job of explaining "I couldn't care less" this video I now return you to your normal programming.
I think we agree with each other. Words like "ain't" entering the common lexicon (usually in spoken english) is fine by me ie. Words formed out of contractions of other words/phrases, or entirely new inventions. What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct. Eg: this video
In the simplest case, the thing referred to is 'a think', and they're entirely equivalent :) I'd argue that this is more of an Eggcorn[1] than a malapropism, unlike your second example. "The proof is in the pudding", or the classic "Could care less"[2] are the two worst offenders I can think of immediately. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
But "I could care less" is a perfectly grammatical sentence, which has a semantic meaning, which, as David Mitchell explains at comic length, is the opposite of what the speaker means to say. this video
> The majority of the world doesn't speak English And yet here we are. To paraphrase David Mitchell ( this video ), the problem is not so much the prevelance of American English, which in a lot of situations makes sense. eg. "sidewalk" makes a lot of sense, perhaps more, than "pavement" for the place that a pedestrian walks at the side of a road. "Parking lot" for a lot of land that is reserved for parking etc. The issue is that "could care less" means the opposite of what people intend them to mean, and they're just expecting the people listening to interpret what they mean.