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."
https://twitter.com/anyone_famous/status/1399419475586322437
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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