Which sounds right to you?
– I couldn’t care less about sport.
– I could care less about sport.
To me the first makes sense and sounds right. It also applies to me – I have no real interest in sport. So I couldn’t care any less about it, because I don’t care about it at all.
The second one sounds a bit strange to me. I would interpret it as meaning that I’m not really into sport, but do care at least a little about it.
Do you use one or both of these expressions? If not, what would you say instead?
How do you express these ideas in other languages?
Well, I have a limited interest in sport (rather more in some – such as rugby and cricket – than in others) so I suppose for me it would be technically accurate to say “I could care less” (with the implication that I could also care quite a bit more).
However, since the purpose of the idiom as I understand it is generally to convey a more-or-less complete lack of interest in a subject, I’d definitely say the first is the more natural wording and the one that finds its place in my own idiolect (though, when it comes to sports, only for some – such as (association) football).
When I’ve come across people saying “I could care less” (to mean “I couldn’t…”) I think it’s always been American English speakers, so I wonder if it would be possible to generalise and say that it’s a difference between US and UK English (without passing comment about which of us speaks the language properly 🙂
This is closely related to Stephen Krashen’s monitor hypothesis; in which you know there is something wrong but you don’t know exactly what it is. In this case, “I couldn’t care less about sport” just SOUNDS right, but we cannot easily explain why. Currently I am studying linguistics at the University and we are going over this very same topic! Please check out my website, it is also about translation. Cheers! Excellent blog btw 🙂
I’ve always sort of this as a question with an implied ‘as if …’ – in other words, do you think I could possibly care less?