[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them
all yourself.

Eleanor Roosevelt

 

It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish.

J. R. R. Tolkien

 

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.

Agatha Christie

 

There are always going to be people who want to be president, and some days
I'd like to give it to them. 

Bill Clinton

 

Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.

Unknown

 

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

James Thurber

 

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I could care less

 

The form I could care less has provoked a vast amount of comment and
criticism in the past. Few people have had a kind word for it, and many have
been vehemently opposed to it (William and Mary Morris, for example, in the
Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, back in 1975, called it "an
ignorant debasement of language", which seems much too powerful a
condemnation). Writers are less inclined to abuse it these days, perhaps
because Americans have had time to get used to it.

 

A bit of history first: the original expression, of course, was I couldn't
care less, meaning "it is impossible for me to have less interest or concern
in this matter, since I am already utterly indifferent". It is originally
British. The first record of it in print found is in 1901, in a story
published both in the Church Standard and the Sunday Magazine. It seems to
have reached the US in the late 1940s and to have become popular in the
latter part of that decade. The inverted form I could care less was coined
in the US and is found only there. It may have begun to be used in the early
1960s, though it turns up in a written form only in 1966.

 

Why it lost its negative has been much discussed. It's clear that the
process is different from the shift in meaning that took place with cheap at
half the price. In that case, the inversion was due to a mistaken
interpretation of its meaning, as has happened, for example, with beg the
question.

 

In these cases people have tried to apply logic, and it has failed them.
Attempts to be logical about I could care less also fail. Taken literally,
if one could care less, then one must care at least a little, which is
obviously the opposite of what is meant. It is so clearly logical nonsense
that to condemn it for being so (as some commentators have done) misses the
point. The intent is obviously sarcastic - the speaker is really saying, "As
if there was something in the world that I care less about".

 

However, this doesn't explain how it came about in the first place.
Something caused the negative to vanish even while the original form of the
expression was still very much in vogue and available for comparison.
Stephen Pinker, in The Language Instinct, points out that the pattern of
intonation in the two versions is very different.

 

There's a close link between the stress pattern of I could care less and the
kind that appears in certain sarcastic or self-deprecatory phrases that are
associated with the Yiddish heritage and (especially) New York Jewish
speech. Perhaps the best known is I should be so lucky!, in which the real
sense is often "I have no hope of being so lucky", a closely similar stress
pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning. There's no evidence to
suggest that I could care less came directly from Yiddish, but the
similarity is suggestive. There are other American expressions that have a
similar sarcastic inversion of apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!,
which usually means "Don't tell me about it, because I know all about it
already". These may come from similar sources.

 

So it's actually a very interesting linguistic development. But it is still
regarded as slangy, and also has some social class stigma attached. And
because it is hard to be sarcastic in writing, it loses its force when put
on paper and just ends up looking stupid. In such cases, the older form,
while still rather colloquial, at least will communicate your meaning - at
least to those who really could care less.

--------------------

Take a powder

 

Make a speedy departure, run away, as in "I looked around and he was
gone-he'd taken a powder". This slangy idiom may be derived from the British
dialect sense of powder as "a sudden hurry," a usage dating from about 1600.
It may also allude to the explosive quality of gunpowder.

 

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What did Englishman Edwin Budding invent in 1830?

A: The lawn mower, or as he described it: "machinery for the purpose of
cropping or shearing the vegetable surface of lawns.

 

On what wardrobe item did zipper inventor Whitcomb Judson use his first
"clasp locker" in the late nineteenth century?

A: A pair of boots.

 

Who invented charcoal briquettes?

A: Henry Ford, to make use of scrap wood left over in the manufacture of the
Model T.

 

Who is second only to Thomas Edison in the number of U.S. patents granted
for inventions?

A: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera.

 

What famous circus performer introduced the flying trapeze?

A: French Aerialist Jules Leotard, who also invented the tights we call
leotards.

 

A certain Capt. Hanson Gregory is credited with a curious invention:  It has
neither weight nor density; it can be seen but not felt. What is it?

A: The donut hole.

 

What piece of modern office equipment was first developed in 1842 by
Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain?

A: The facsimile machine--better known as the fax. Bain was granted a patent
in 1843.