Launching Operation SaturatEng - Because I *Could* Care Less
Posted on October 29, 2007
Filed Under Operation SaturatEng |
I always find it amazing how successful certain memes can be. Amazing and, in the case of some memes (could care less, loosing etc), depressing.
I find “I could care less” to be the worst given that just a moment’s thought surely makes it clear that it actually means the opposite to what the poster meant to say.
What can be done about such a post. Well, usually posting a reply pointing out the mistake is not well received. They don’t like being publicly corrected. Fair enough, after all who does? Although the abuse that normally follows discourages people from making such corrections leaving subsequent occurrences of the mal-meme a clear field to corrupt others 
.
So I’m launching Operation SaturatEng as an experiment.
The idea is to accumulate a group of online posters who, whenever they come across the current linguistic target in a blog post, or comment, or forum etc make a post or comment themselves that uses the word or phrase correctly while being in character for the site on which it is posted.
If the site is active enough then a single post might get lost so perhaps a post on the relevant page here could bring reinforcements for another corrective post; the idea being to make it pervasive without taking over the thread in the process. If the meme cannot be converted then hopefully it can be outcompeted.
If you would be interested in helping out Operation SaturatEng then please post below so that I can see whether it is worth continuing with this. Any suggestions as to the operation’s operation happily received (even if I don’t agree with them 
).
Needless to say, I’m intending to make November’s target “I could care less” vs “I couldn’t care less”.
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4 Responses to “Launching Operation SaturatEng - Because I *Could* Care Less”
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THANKS for this post. This has been a big pet peeve of mine for a long time. I have been mocked when trying to correct my friends. Needless to say I wish “I could care less.” but I can’t.
What you should do is put together a really detailed explaination of the mistake and put it on this site. Then whenever a would-be “correction” post is made, it can just point to it rather than risk explaining the mistake incorrectly. The last thing you should do when pointing out a mistake is to make one!
I’m interested but I’m not sure I see enough posts on a daily basis to really come up with anything. But if enough people were interested it could really have an impact. But then again, I think the “evolution” of the language is probably unstoppable.
Oh and blogs should be targetted, too.
Dave: I intend to put together a more detailed page for each target. I probably wasn’t clear enough in my post but I want to avoid “correcting” people. I want to provide correct examples wherever we come across an incorrect example in order to try and out compete the mal-meme.
If the page about the specific page is linked to at all then I think the link should only say “Operation SaturatEng” for recruitment purposes in order to avoid hijacking a large number of threads.
Not hijacking threads is my main concern as this will only work if we can get a large enough group together.
Speaking of which, I will not be starting this in November as I have not left myself enough time to do recruitment. I’m thinking maybe in the new year. If you know anybody else who might be interested then please do invite them along. A lot of people have blogged about this phrase but fewer seem prepared to try and do anything about it.
Finally, I’m not trying to stop the language evolving. I’m just trying to apply some selection criteria to that evolution
.
I think with things like “I could care less” the most effective thing to do is take it that way. (I don’t really know how to explain that so I’ll give an example.)
Person A: I could care less about politics.
Person B: Oh, so you’re interested in it? Me too. What is your stance on _____.
-Or-
Person A: I could care less about politics.
Person B: Oh, really? I couldn’t care less about it, I absolutely can’t stand politicians and their debates.
If you have a particularly dumb “Person A,” you may end up having to explain yourself, but most of the time it makes the offender think about what they said and realize that it is completely illogical.
Obviously, a lot of grammatical issues can’t be dealt with this way, but some can and it’s an easy way to get your point across without saying something like, “HEY! That’s wrong, stupid!”