{"id":37374,"date":"2018-03-22T08:15:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-22T13:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=37374"},"modified":"2018-03-22T09:44:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-22T14:44:42","slug":"more-on-could-verb-phrase-of-minimal-concern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=37374","title":{"rendered":"More on \"Could <verb-phrase-of-minimal-concern>\""},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Goodman, \"Dan Hurley, front-runner for UConn job, hasn't thought about openings 'for a second'<\/a>\", ESPN 3\/18\/2018:<\/p>\n

\"Listen, I could give a crap about who's got an opening anywhere,\" Hurley said. \"I haven't thought about it for a second. I could care less what any other school in the country that's looking for a coach or talks about me on social media — I could give two craps about that. My heart, my mind is with this program and these players that just lost a brutal game after having an amazing last couple seasons, and for me it's easy.\"<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mr. Hurley give us two generalizations by analogy of the idiom could care less<\/em>: \"could give a crap\" and \"could give two craps\".\u00a0 (He might have gone one to say that he's out of craps to give — see e.g. \"Expletive deficits<\/a>\", 7\/18\/2015.)<\/p>\n

In 2010, Jan Freeman documented 50 years of peeving about\u00a0could care less<\/em>: \"Half a century of (not) caring less<\/a>\". And in 2005, Ben Zimmer antedated the controversial phrase itself to 1955 — \"Wrong for so long<\/a>\" — and today's larger newspaper archives show a flowering of slightly earlier mid-1950s examples, such as this example from The Chilliwack Progress<\/em> (Chilliwack, British Columbia) for 1\/6\/1954:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I've previously argued against Steve Pinker's theory that could care less<\/em> is just ironic (\"Caring less with stress<\/a>\", 7\/8\/2004, and\u00a0\"Speaking sarcastically<\/a>\", 7\/13\/2004), and instead agreed with John Lawler's\u00a0theory that it's \"Negation by association<\/a>\", 7\/13\/2004. Here's John's explanation:<\/p>\n

Give a damn<\/em>\u00a0is a member of the open\u00a0Minimal Direct Object<\/em>\u00a0class of NPI's, like\u00a0lift a finger, drink a drop, do a thing, eat a bite<\/em>, etc. The implication of all of them is that, if one can't even\u00a0Verb<\/strong>\u00a0a\u00a0Minimal Direct Object<\/strong>, why, then, one couldn't\u00a0Verb<\/strong>\u00a0any\u00a0Direct Object<\/strong>\u00a0at all. Thus it's an idiomatic intensification of a negative. But it does usually require a negative to intensify.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, there apparently is such a thing as negation by association. Like what happened to French\u00a0pas<\/em>\u00a0from\u00a0ne…pas<\/em>, which is now usable as a negative in its own right, from long association in the discontinuous morpheme with the overt negative\u00a0ne<\/em>,\u00a0give a damn<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0could care less<\/em>\u00a0have, in American usage at least, come to have their own quasi-independent negative force.<\/span><\/p>\n

But we don't have a clear picture of which instantiations of the pattern \"could <negative-polarity-verb-phrase>\" exhibit negation by association — most of John Lawler's examples of the Minimal Direct Object<\/em> class\u00a0 don't, for example. The answer might just be that idiom formation is irregular, but I suspect that there's more to say about this.<\/p>\n

Some other relevant LLOG posts:<\/p>\n

\"'Could care less' occurs more<\/a>\" (7\/13\/2004)
\n\"Lederer should care less<\/a>\" (7\/8\/2004)
\n\"(Auto)biography of a blog thread<\/a>\" (7\/16\/2004)
\n\"Most of the people in the world could care less<\/a>\u00a0(7\/16\/2004)
\n\"Caring less all the time: A variant of the etymological fallacy, and some cautions about the pragmatics-phonetics connection<\/a>\u00a0(7\/24\/2004)
\n\"The future of the history of usage<\/a>\u00a0(4\/16\/2005)
\n\"The care less train has left the station<\/a>\u00a0(6\/20\/2005)
\n\"Caring more or less<\/a>\u00a0(6\/29\/2005)
\n\"Ask Language Log: More or less?<\/a>\", 6\/30\/2008<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Goodman, \"Dan Hurley, front-runner for UConn job, hasn't thought about openings 'for a second'\", ESPN 3\/18\/2018: \"Listen, I could give a crap about who's got an opening anywhere,\" Hurley said. \"I haven't thought about it for a second. I could care less what any other school in the country that's looking for a coach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,248],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-idioms","category-usage"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37374"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37409,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37374\/revisions\/37409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}