It’s not like that at all. “I could care less” is just wrong. The phrase is “I couldn’t care less.” “I could care less” is more like “one and the same” or “for all intensive purposes.”

If a phrase conveys the opposite of their literal meaning, and the speaker and the audience both know it, then it is pedantic. Choosing to derail whatever the topic is in favor of criticizing someone's understandability when everyone did understand them is pedantic.

I get it, I hate the way people use "literally". It's terrible, it's usually unneeded, and it just makes any actual correct use of literally have less impact. But I'm not gonna correct people who say it wrong, because I do know what they meant.

If they said "I could care less" and you're comfortable enough in your understanding of the conversation to know for a fact they actually mean they do not care about it, then they did make sense and you did understand them.

Just because you’re being pedantic doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong.

Idioms don't have to make literal sense. How do you feel about being "head over heels" about someone?

/c/badlinguistics

yes it really is

I see this one a lot, and it always says to me that people just use these phrases because other people use them, without ever thinking about what they mean.

It’s only pedantry if you force others to do it your way.

I've always taken "I could care less" to be sarcastic. Like "It's technically possible, but quite unlikely."

I'm not sure what part doesn't make sense about the original

Yeah if they cared enough to care less. Therefore they don't care enough to care less about something.