> I can guarantee you Nintendo, as a tightly controlled company, could care less about this volatility.

couldn't* care less?

Put it on the list with "lowest common denominator" and "begs the question". That battle is lost.

I never feel guilty about sending this along: http://begthequestion.info/

Even if language and idioms change, we need more ways to describe fallacies of circular reasoning, not fewer.

Can you show an example of "lowest common denominator" being misused? I've never noticed it so fear I may be guilty of misusing it.

The correct version is greatest common denominator. The lowest common denominator is usually 1.

Maybe you're thinking of divisor instead of denominator?

They're pretty much the same thing, some fractions are expressed as numerator/denominator

Divisor in the sense of greatest common divisor is not the same as a denominator. More to the point, we may indeed care about greatest common divisors, but we also care about least common denominators (i.e. least common multiples)

Whoops! I usually get this right but apparently not this time. I do appreciate the correction! :)

Off topic but "could care less" and "couldn't care less" are both idioms in common use with the same meaning

"could care less" is a mistake that just grew popular enough to become common use; it doesn't make any sense as a statement since it implies that you haven't hit your care 'floor'.

This may be a bitter pill to swallow, but silly and meaningless idioms are a dime a dozen. When push comes to shove, it's not something worth losing your cool over.

Perhaps they're a dime-a-dozen because they go unchallenged?

I've had junior members of staff express genuine surprise when I've corrected such mistakes in documents. It's a difficult thing to do without offense, but when clear meaning is imperative there's no leeway for doubt.

In 20 years time, will people still understand today's silly idioms or try to read them literally? "Nip it in the butt!"

Idioms survive hundreds of years once established and using them is not a mistake. "Head over heels" is another good example.

Don't worry, I wasn't mashing my fingers into my keyboard in a sweaty rage while typing the above. Life is full of little annoyances, some are fun to comment on though.

Mistake according to what standard?

That standard can't be "doesn't make sense", as a lot of language doesn't make sense

It was "As if I could care less" which is "couldn't care less"

This is not reddit. Your comment adds nothing to the discussion.

Let someone who is pedantic about language, be pedantic. It's not like this is a feature unique to the reddit user base, it abounds on all corners of the internet.

I usually send personal messages when I see this particular error. That's not possible on HN, so I guess a comment is the next best thing. Your downvotes, however, tell me we should just get used to seeing it "could care less" more often.

> I usually send personal messages

why??

> this particular error

It isn't an error, unless you think language has to be perfectly regular and logical with no warts. That's a fantasy. Language develops organically and as such we should expect contradictions and illogical constructions to arise from time to time.

Everyone knows what "could care less" means. There's no external, objective standard by which you can say it's "incorrect". Stop worrying about it.

An example of this type of inversion that has become widespread: in French, "pas" means "not", but originally meant "step", and came into its current meaning via (roughly) the following sequence:

"Je ne marche" (I don't walk) -> "Je ne marche pas" (something like: I don't walk [even a single] step) -> "Je marche pas" (over time, "ne" became dropped in informal speech, and "pas" carries the negative meaning.)

You just blew my mind - never gave a thought to the etymology of "pas". I had to verify it because I simply couldn't believe it.

Come to think of it it also explains how "point" is sometimes used instead of "pas".

Yep, and constructions like "il ne dit mot", "il ne boit goutte", etc., were once much more common than they are today. Not sure why "pas" became the canonical negation word out of all those choices.

I doubt that they don't care about dropping 17% in a single day. Losing 6 billion dollars of valuation in a single day is enough to put heads on the chopping block. It is a staggering amount of money to lose especially with the possibility of getting de-listed in the Tokyo Stock Exchange

But they didn't lose any money. The stock valuation did. Valuation that had recently been inflated due Pokemon Go.

Until Pokemon, Nintendo had been hovering at 15k since the beginning of the year. As of this writing it's at 23220.

All we can take away from this is that Nintendo is still in trouble, just like they have been since before the release of Pokemon Go.

Was it in trouble before?

Yes, the release of the Wii U a few years ago turned out to be a failure, and the sales of the 3DS is dropping off. They have announced their new console, the Nintendo NX, but have released next to no information about it (people don't even know if it's a console or a handheld).

Here's an article about it written before Pokemon Go came out: http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/04/27/why-nintendo-is-in-re...

They didn't lose any money or anything else of value. The wisdom-of-the-crowds appraisal of the value of their company changed. That's it. Nintendo didn't "lose" anything.

This is a Japanese Bigco we're talking about here. Literally no heads are on the chopping block with this.