He Could Care Less About Obama's Story

[platypeanArchcow]

Your title is misleading.

To say that one *could* care less implies that there is a level of disinterest that has yet to be reached. What you meant, surely, is the he *couldn't* care less, implying that there was no way that his regard for the matter could stoop any lower.

Speak good english, dammit.

"Could care less" is not incorrect, it's sarcastic.  This is clear from its intonation: to mean that you are actually able to care less, you would emphasize only the word 'less', but the idiom is usually emphasized more strongly on 'care' with a secondary emphasis on 'less'.  "Couldn't care less," on the other hand, is not an English idiom except among the hypercorrect.

Speak idiomatic English, dammit.

[platypeanArchcow]

Thanks for completely ignoring what I said?

[platypeanArchcow]

It's not idiomatic English; it's just flat-out wrong English stemming from people saying something without really thinking about it.  It's akin to "could of" instead of "could have".

No, it's not wrong, it's sarcastic: when people say it, they mean the opposite.  You can tell from the intonation with which it is usually said.  Now I'm just repeating myself.

This isn't a prescriptivist v. descriptivist argument.  I'm as much a prescriptivist as pretty much anyone else here.  But it's a pet peeve of mine when the public is declared wrong just because it's more clever than people give it credit for.

[platypeanArchcow]

It's not idiomatic English; it's just flat-out wrong English stemming from people saying something without really thinking about it.  It's akin to "could of" instead of "could have".

No, it's not wrong, it's sarcastic: when people say it, they mean the opposite.  You can tell from the intonation with which it is usually said.  Now I'm just repeating myself.

This isn't a prescriptivist v. descriptivist argument.  I'm as much a prescriptivist as pretty much anyone else here.  But it's a pet peeve of mine when the public is declared wrong just because it's more clever than people give it credit for.

I have heard many people say "I could care less".  There is generally no sarcasm or specific intonation whatsoever.  They say "I could care less" with the identical intonation that you would give the statement "I couldn't care less", indicating that what they meant was the latter.  The intonation is different from someone actually intending to say that they could care less, yes, but that's because what they meant to say was "couldn't care less", not because they're being clever and secretly sarcastic.

It is not a clever idiomatic use of language; it is just repeating incorrect English without thinking about it.

I described the intonation above, and it's different from that with which you'd say "I couldn't care less", because there you'd emphasize the 'couldn't'.  In any case, I don't buy the idea that people are saying semantically incorrect statements without thinking about them.  Certainly we have pretty good machinery built in to piece out the meanings of statements in languages that we speak, and although it screws up on occasion, can you name a single other way in which it does so regularly?  Double negatives don't count since they are grammatically correct in most languages and in certain nonstandard varieties of English.  When I was 10 I knew that when I said "I could care less" I was being sarcastic.  (I've stopped saying it since because I'm likely to be corrected by people like you, but reading Steven Pinker reinforced the intuition.  Don't remember which book.)