Do you "could care less"?

Wow, two blogs in one day! Must be a record. You may think I have nothing to do at work, but you may wrong. It just so happens that I triaged everything and made the Obamaic decision that education of the masses should not wait, will not wait, must not wait.

The purpose of this blog post is to once and for all end the debate between "could care less" and "couldnt care less" in favour of the former. What will really be proven is that the two usages are equivalent. This result is in favour of the former, sorta by analogy to traditional vs guerrilla warfare (it is said that in the former, you lose if you dont win; in the latter, you win if you dont lose).

To self-appointed language purists, such as the one with the niche, "could care less" is an abomination. "I couldnt care less" means the amount I care (ε) is so little that a smaller amount cannot be measured. On the other hand, when someone says "I could care less", it means that ε is big enough that one could care less. Indeed, this makes ε really a δ, ie. one cares some, which defeats the purpose of what one is trying to say.

This is a perfectly logical argument. What, I'm agreeing? Yes, indeed, logically this is a flawless argument. But then... what's the catch?

No sooner than. Yes, "no sooner than" is the catch. So also is inflammable, but we will stick to no sooner than. No sooner A happened than B did means B happened immediately after A. Literally however, it means B happened as soon as A did OR any time after A did. "No sooner the coals were lit than I walked on them" is a literally correct thing to say, even if the walking was done a few weeks after the coals burned out. What you really want to say, by analogy with "couldnt care less", is something like "no later A happened than B did". In other words, "no sooner than" and "no later than" mean exactly the same thing. And no language purist to my knowledge has ever gone after no sooner than.

Which brings me to my point. English is not a logically perfect language. Opposites mean the same (above examples), the same word means its opposite (dust a chair vs dust a cake), opposites are made from words that dont exist (nobody's seen a gruntled old man). In fact, no non-fake human language is perfect, because humans arent perfect. So there's no reason to argue. Let us "could care less". I "could care less" coz it's got one less syllable so it's more efficient. Whatever your reason, "could care less" with pride.