"I Could Care Less"

PoorOldPo · 11-20-2012, 07:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gunnels

We have two threads devoted to bitching, ya know.

Well go ahead and bitch about it in the bitch thread!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Exoskeletal

I could care less about this thread.

I knew someone would do that. Argh!!!!(in an angry Southern Irish accent)

Also, to all Americans

It is called Aluminium, not Aluminum!

And COLOUR! Not Color.

Argh!!!!(in an angry Southern Irish accent)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neapolitan

In a way I disagree. A person saying they don't care is expressing apathy not that they are not fully disliking or hating. To quote Elie Wiesel:

[/LIST]

I could not care any less about the person, anothers i care so little about that person, that the not caring about that person has reached its not caring human limit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neapolitan

Other mixed metaphors that I could care very little about:

Other mixed metaphors you care very little about, not could. Could is not definitive.

Freebase Dali · 11-20-2012, 07:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PoorOldPo

Also, to all Americans

It is called Aluminium, not Aluminum!

And COLOUR! Not Color.

Argh!!!!(in an angry Southern Irish accent)

We Americans actually have a different standard for English than you guys, understandably. It's considered correct to spell it as Aluminum here. In fact, the guy who discovered Aluminum actually named it that at one point, before changing it to Aluminium. The dictionary we used at the time still had the Aluminum entry and just became more ingrained. Then eventually, in 1925 actually, the American Chemical Society officially named it Aluminum, seeing as how it was becoming more commonly used, so that's what we say, since it's all up in our textbooks and all.

So, in that case, it isn't simply Americans completely not seeing the letters of the word they're pronouncing. We spell it, and say it, as Aluminum.

As far as colour vs color, I don't know much about the history behind that, but I do know that our official word for it is color, not colour. (Whether that makes as much sense as having a different voltage standard and measuring scale and temperature scale as the rest of the world, I don't know.)

So for that, I'll just quote something I picked up off a grammar website just now:

Quote:

Both spellings are many centuries old. Color, now regarded as the American spelling, in fact predates the United States by several centuries. In early use they vied for ascendancy with several other spellings. Colur, culoure, and coolor, for instance, were all in the mix before the modern British spelling gained permanent dominance in the 17th century.1 The American preference for color took hold in the middle 19th century thanks in large part to the work of American lexicographer Noah Webster, whose spelling books and dictionaries were instrumental in shaping American English as we know it today.

Hope that all at least introduces the idea that Americans aren't simply going to English class and refusing to accept spelling things with extra U's in them.