Thursday March 28th, 2024 9:48PM

On patrol with the Grammar Police

We had an interesting discussion around here last week about proper grammar.

You’d think that a bunch of journalists would know everything there is to know about grammar and that there would be no arguments. But the English language being what it is, filled with all sorts of rules and exceptions to those rules, even the smartest among us gets tripped up occasionally.

This particularly discussion centered around the expression “I could care less.” We ask a daily survey question on our website and readers can choose from one of the multiple-choice answers. Last week, one of the options was “I could care less.”

An alert reader, who said she was a writer, wrote to complain. “It’s quite annoying coming from a news site.”

And that’s what started the whole discussion. Which is correct? I could care less. Or I couldn’t care less.

Being the proud English major, I argued that our reader was correct. If one is attempting to say “I don’t care anything at all about this particular thing,” then saying “I could care less” isn’t correct. “I could care less” means one does care some, not one doesn’t care at all. If one doesn’t care at all, one should say “I couldn’t care less.”

But a co-worker disagreed with me. She argued that “I could care less” was equally correct. Her argument was that “I could care less” had become colloquial, and that one who said didn’t mean it to say one actually cared to some degree.

I concede the point that “I could care less” has probably become a colloquial term. That doesn’t mean it is right.

Americans love to mess with the English language. Just because someone says something and it gets repeated doesn’t make it grammatically correct.

Take the word “ain’t” for instance. The word isn’t proper English, and it should be used in formal writing, as Mrs. Hall, my favorite English teacher will attest. However, I use “ain’t” in this column all the time. “Ain’t” sometimes is just the right word in a personal column like mine.

Consider. I don’t like Brussels sprouts. I could say “I have no intention of ever eating any of those Brussels sprouts.” I would be proper English. But it doesn’t convey my utter distaste for those things.

Instead, I would say, “I ain’t eating them things.” My use of “ain’t” is used to convey my real feelings. But it ain’t grammatically correct.

Words have meanings. We tend to forget that. I laugh when friends use the word “irregardless,” because that isn’t a word. The proper word is “regardless.”

I teach an entire lesson in my journalism course on the use of “amount” and “number.” One should use “number” anytime something can actually be counted – the number of parking spaces, the number of games, the number of grains of sand on the beach.

Yet I still hear my students say things like, “The amount of parking spaces on this campus continues to decline,” which makes me want to fail them and send them back to remedial English.

And don’t get me started on “less” and “fewer.”

A lot of people will read this column and say I’m being overly sensitive about the abuses of the English language. They’ll say the point of communications to be clear to the listener or reader and as long as what you are writing or saying is understood, what’s the problems?

To be honest, I couldn’t care less.

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