this one drives me crazy, and someone made an image to explain why. (Thanks internet!)
AND I just found this site: literally, a weblog which documents abuses of the word "literally" which are, pretty much, as funny as abuses of quotation marks.
"Banheiro" "quebrado"
8 years ago
8 comments:
I love this chart! However, I think it might be preaching to the choir.
P.S. Please don't read my blog. Your head will explode on account of all the bad grammar.
That one makes me crazy, too.
I choose to believe that "I could care less" is facetious.
Diesel, that would work for me, except that usually when people are sarcastic, they indicate it with their tone, and with this one, usually not.
Ah, a fellow grammarian! You should read the humor article by comedy writer Rob Bloom about misusing language. http://www.robbloom.com/creative/literally.htm
Thank you for posting that. As a non-native speaker I always wondered what people meant when they said "I could care less." (???) So you DO in fact care? Then why the face?
So I guess now, it's just something that many native speakers simply use in a wrong way, right?
jaelle, thank you for validating my crankiness. You're exactly right - when most english speakers say "I could care less" they actually mean they don't care.
I hate using quotes to indicate a special word. The word should be italicized or underlined. Grammar pet peeves bug me, but so do pronunciation pet peeves. Check out these Top 40 Pronunciation Pet Peeves, but warning… you may cringe on a few that you mispronounce.
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