I see what you did there. Well done.
"care less : not to care — used positively and negatively with the same meaning <I could care less what happens> <I couldn't care less what happens>"
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The material is very flammable or inflammable.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/flammable-or-i...
English is confusing.
http://www.dictionary.com/e/could-care-less/
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2016/04/05/the_rea...
> people who say “I could care less” are omitting the first part: “Like I could care less,” [Slate link]
These quotes seem to sum up those links.
But now that you've explained it, I see it works the other way too!
"Finally I learned to care less about these kinds of language rules."
There is something delicious about two seemingly contradictory phrases that mean the same thing, and one phrase that can mean two opposite things.
A lot of other people were taught the same rule, but hopefully they've realized as I finally did that it just doesn't matter.
Here are some interesting discussions from both sides of the fence:
https://www.google.com/search?q=due+to+because+of
Joseph Emonds argued in the paper "Grammatically Deviant Prestige Constructions" that the underlying reason for some of these arbitrary distinctions was as a social class signifier: if you used "correct" grammar it helped indicate to others that you were a member of a more prestigious class:
Some years ago I went on an editing binge on Wikipedia, finding a bunch of templates that "misused" the phrase "due to" and changed them to "because of". As we all know, you must get this right:
"The flight delay was due to bad weather."
vs.
"The flight was delayed because of bad weather."
but never:
"The flight was delayed due to bad weather."
The next day, someone reverted all my changes and asked, "Mike, have you looked at a dictionary lately?"
Oops.
In that moment I was enlightened: I realized I could care less.
I even leave out the Oxford comma as often as I use it. In fact I leave out a lot of commas I used to put in.
But there is one case where the Oxford comma is still necessary. If you leave it out of this joke it ruins it:
"There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache expiration, and off by one errors."