2005-06-30 - 12:17 p.m.

Ahhhh, religious cult religious cult.
http://www.rickross.com/reference/srichinmoy/srichinmoy2.html

now the idea of couldn't care less, could care less, just my $0.02:

couldn't care less - you give so little attention and consideration to it, that it is in fact impossible for you to care less
could care less - you are surprised by the fact that you could, in fact, care less about this situation - this implies that it means diddly-squat to you, and it's very surprising that something could matter less to you OR exactly the same meaning as 'couldn't care less'
(No, I'm not on the 'it's sarcasm!' bandwagon, and I know that my argument makes very little sense, but I can't phrase it more clearly, which, I suppose, shows that perhaps I shouldn't be putting forward my own opinions and theories on grammar.)

On that note, however, I'm going to say this much: implied negatives. When you're using familiar language some double negatives (speaking in English, by the way) are less wince-inducing than others. If you accept "He knows squat" as meaning "he knows very little", then you're not in the minority. But "He doesn't know squat" is also used, and very few people are going to yell about it. (And if they do, chances are it's going to be an argument like the American 'pop/soda'; OR they're way too damned smart for their own good and nobody's going to follow what they say, what with all the 'syntax' and 'pragmatic', what-have-you. The essay title "Optimization via syntactic amalgam: Syntax-prosody mismatch and copula doubling" makes me sob like a little baby.)

The end! No, but seriously, I don't have much else to say about grammar today, and I hope I haven't bored anyone to tears. That wouldn't be good.