Amazing jobs (no. 327 of a series)
Mark Liberman writes:
According to eminent linguist and negative polarity expert John Lawler, *They don’t care less. is an ungrammatical sentence.
I am very excited that there’s someone walking around being a “negative polarity expert”. No doubt they could have made much use of him in Star Trek…
Scotty: The negative polarity rods can’t take any more, Mr Lawler. We may want to go to Warp Factor 8, but they don’t care less.
Lawler: I think you’ll find you’re mistaken, Mr Scott.
On a slightly more serious note, I rest assured that both Mark Liberman and John Lawler are not the ruler-tapping grammatical pedants of yesteryear. They acknowledge that they are merely tracking usage, not imposing arbitrary rules — description, not prescription.
