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What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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a couple always means two.
every time anyone says “a couple”, i ask them if they mean two. it’s not pleasant exchange for either of us, but it must be done
It's interesting because this also happens in other languages. In Dutch we only use couple (koppel) for people in a relationship.
If you are talking about other things we use "pair" if you have two. But over time people also started using pair wrong, so someone saying "ik heb een paar knikkers" I have a pair of marbles, can still mean he has 5 marbles.
In practice people usually just say I have two marbles when they mean exactly 2.
Funny that knikkers are marbles! Probably used to be the same in English with een paar, but with language change moving English away from its West Germanic roots we tend not to use 'pair' so often any more except when referring to specific things where it's important that there's two of them, like aces or... knickers.
Couple -2
Few - 3 or more
Lot - anybody’s guess
There's a word for if you mean exactly two: two.
Oh, this sparked my hill to die on - two (2). Why the fuck do you need to put it into Hindu-Arabic numeral form (parenthetically, and condescendingly) when you've already given the word in text, which is otherwise in English and it can be assumed that most English-speakers know the word two?!
There are multiple words that describe numbers.
Couple, pair, and two are all words that describe the number 2.
Disagree. I've always understood it to mean approximately two. Usually 2-3; 4 isn't outlandish.
Unless that's the meaning, the expression doesn't have a reason to exist. So that's how I decide to interpret it.
Wrong. A couple is two exactly. After the wedding: Oh look at the happy couple. There aren't 3 or 4 people standing there, 2 people are standing there. A couple.
To couple train carriages together means to attach two carriages together. There are more carriages behind that one, but they were all individually coupled together.
Aw come on, those are two very different meanings of the word in my book. As it happens, the couple of eggs I took out of the fridge aren't in a romantic relationship.
Look in any English language dictionary. Show me an entry that states a couple is more than two
I‘ll wait.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/couple-few-several-use
So yeah, the meaning of "at least two but possibly a bit more than that" has been around for a loooooong time.
Starting a post with "Wrong." and listing a few items that support your view is... Well it gives me Reddit energy, not a good thing. ;)
Here are some counterexamples that negate it: "I'll be ready in a couple of minutes", "it's a couple of miles away".
This does not always mean exactly two. I mean, if you just want to yell out "it always means exactly two!" Then that's on you, but in the English language everyone else in the world uses, it often means two, but can also mean around but not exactly two, depending on the use case.
Look in any English language dictionary. Show me an entry that states a couple is more than two.
I‘ll wait.
True. Otherwise we'd have no use for that stupid word 'throuple'. We should call them fews.
The word you're thinking of is "several".
Doesn't that exclude 2?
Looks like there are conflicting definitions. From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/several
So maybe it's what you mean lol
You're right but also it's weird that we have a common phrase that means "exactly two" when we could just say "two". I think about that sometimes.
It gets weirder because you can also say "a pair". And it gets even weirder because "a pair" means "2 that are meant to be together" whereas "a couple" means two that were put together, which is why it sounds weird to say you got a "couple of socks" (most people would understand this as 4 socks) instead of a "pair of socks".
I'd understand it as two mismatched socks.
Why is it weird?
You could just say 'two weeks', but you could also say 'a fortnight'.
Come to think of it, you could even say 'a couple of weeks'