Nevertheless, itās a lazy and poor use of English despite the fact that we are expected to know and use the supposed meaning of the perverted phrase. Laziness of speech has given rise to common misunderstandings that often negatively affect intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships.
Francis Bacon wrote about this in his dissertation on The Four Idols of the mind (obstacles to accurate perception and communication), which, if memory serves, appeared in Baconās Aphorism XXIII of the First Book (1901); to wit:
But the Idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all ā idols which have crept into the understanding through the alliances of words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words; but it is also true that words react on the understanding; and this it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Now words, being commonly framed and applied according to the capacity of the vulgar*, follow those lines of division which are most obvious to the vulgar understanding. And whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or a more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true divisions of nature, words stand in the way and resist the change. Whence it comes to pass that the high and formal discussions of learned men end oftentimes in disputes about words and names; with which (according to the use and wisdom of the mathematicians) it would be more prudent to begin, and so by means of definitions reduce them to order. Yet even definitions cannot cure this evil in dealing with natural and material things, since the definitions themselves consist of words, and those words beget others. So that it is necessary to recur to individual instances, and those in due series and order, as I shall say presently when I come to the method and scheme for the formation of notions and axioms.
The idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds. They are either names of things which do not exist (for as there are things left unnamed through lack of observation, so likewise are there names which result from fantastic suppositions and to which nothing in reality corresponds), or they are names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities. Of the former kind are Fortune, the Prime Mover, Planetary Orbits, Element of Fire, and like fictions which owe their origin to false and idle theories. And this class of idols is more easily expelled, because to get rid of them it is only necessary that all theories should be steadily rejected and dismissed as obsolete.
You might have to read this a few times in order to fully understand it, because in the late 1800s and early 1900s the writings of philosophers and other learned men (mostly men from the continents of England, Italy, and France) achieved a level of accuracy of expression seldom found but in academic environments.
The bottom line is this; regardless of what you believe the idiom (not Axiom) to truly stand for, the phrase, āI could care less,ā means that the person cares at least a little bit, and that there is, indeed, the possibility to be even less concerned and interested. On the other hand, the phrase, āI couldnāt care less,ā means that the person is utterly uninterested and unconcerned about that which is at hand.
*commoners or laymen; the uneducated, or those educated only to an average level
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