Is it me, or are people getting the "X, let alone Y" construction backwards more and more often these days?
It almost feels like "much less" misuse is sloshing over into "let alone."
Someone mentioned "could care less" in replies, and that's one that I 100% have no problem with.
"Could care less" is obviously idiomatic, and its meaning is unambiguous. It's like "can't have your cake and eat it too"—we all understand it, even if "can't eat your cake and have it too" would make more sense logically.
As long as we all know that "could" and "couldn't care less" mean the same thing—and we do!—it's fine to use them interchangeably, and nothing is lost in a cultural shift from one to the other, in either direction.
But inverting "X much less Y" is more like the shift we're seeing in the meaning of "bemused"—the two versions of the expression mean different things, so getting it wrong is going to confuse, and potentially mislead, the reader.
If I say "she's not going to run for governor, much less senator," you know I'm saying that a campaign for senator is less likely than a gubernatorial run. But only if you're confident that I'm using "much less" correctly. If you're not, you have no way of knowing which I mean.

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More from @studentactivism

30 May
Eddie Albert being in his late forties when he made Roman Holiday is the precise inverse of all of those “look at these middle-aged-ass teenagers from the olden days” threads. Image
Also, apparently the guy who played the barber was fucking the pope? Like, in real life?
(He wasn’t the pope yet, to be clear. But the actor who played the barber who cut all of Audrey Hepburn’s hair off was apparently in a long term relationship with the Archbishop of Milan, who went on to become Pope Paul VI.)
Read 5 tweets
28 May
This entire thread is bullshit, but this tweet in particular is specifically bullshit. When I donate to a campaign, I'm giving money not just to win a specific election, but to build power for progressive politics more generally. And paying staffers well is a part of doing that.
I donated to the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in IDAHO last cycle. Why? Because I wanted to support grassroots progressive politics in the state where my grandfather was a progressive activist. (Also she had a cool tee shirt. But mostly the other thing.)
I was adding my drop to the bucket so she could hire good staff and pay union vendors and distribute lit and provide opportunities for young volunteers. And I don't think I'm all that unusual for having done so.
Read 10 tweets
27 May
Everyone's dunking on Nate Silver today, but I'm not seeing a lot of people flagging his claim that when "one side" of a FACTUAL DISPUTE "is excessively concerned with policing the discourse…that side is more likely than not to be wrong."
I mean, let's start with how he puts his thumb on the scale with "excessively." Is "policing the discourse" evidence that you're in the wrong in a factual dispute? No, because of one side of the dispute is obviously incorrect, they're going to get yelled at more.
So the "excessively" isn't a rhetorical flourish. It's central to his argument. But how can "excessively policing the discourse" be measured? What does it refer to, other than someone's gut feeling that one group of people are yelling at another group of people for bad reasons?
Read 9 tweets
27 May
The whole lab-leak controversy strikes me, more than anything else, as a reflection of the corrosive effects of Trumpism.
When Trump and his cronies said something—anything—that was at odds with what was broadly understood to be true, to treat it as presumptively false was treated as not just wise, but necessary. And that was the right approach, broadly!
Tom Cotton was happy to insinuate that Covid was a Chinese bioweapon, and we've all spent five years learning that to respond to such bullshit with a textured, nuanced, ambiguous rebuttal is to saunter into a trap.
Read 5 tweets
24 May
It always befuddles me when Manhattanites get bent out of shape about skyscrapers.
"It's an eyesore!"
"It's going to cast our neighborhood into shadow!"
"It's a playground for rich people!"
"It's going to make the subways more crowded!"

Dude, do you even go here?
I fucking LOVE the stupid giant spindly rich-people apartment buildings they keep putting up at the south end of Central Park. Love love love them. They make me feel like I'm living in a sci-fi movie about New York City in the 21st century. They're great.
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21 May
Some folks (just a few, and no journalists, but still) have asked how I see the ethics of sharing those DMs from Chris Cuomo that I tweeted yesterday. A couple thoughts on that.
I've always believed that emails and DMs should generally be treated as presumptively private, ethically. But that's a heuristic, not a rule, and there are exceptions.
In this case, the DMs were (1) unsolicited, (2) menacing, and (3) from a powerful, prominent public figure. They contained no personal or private information, and I neither violated confidences nor took advantage of a power disparity by posting the screenshots.
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