A Couple Three as a Vague Number

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hi.

Hi, what’s this?

This is Jennifer, and I am calling from Tucson, Arizona today.

Tucson, just down the road from us.

What’s on your mind, Jennifer?

-huh.

Yeah, I am reaching out because I’m eager to understand the origin of a phrase my father used throughout his life that I’ve only heard one other person ever use and it was a gentleman about his age.

But truth be told, it was a phrase that my brother and I had no idea what it really meant.

And it kind of drew us a little bananas because it didn’t make sense in our child’s mind.

But the phrase is a couple three, and he would often use it, most often in reference to quantity, but sometimes in reference to time, such as, Hey Dad, how long did it take to get there?

And he’d say, Oh, a couple three hours.

He really had no idea how long it took to get there.

So my brother and I would look at each other and kind of like do a little eye roll and just kind of get on with things.

But it’s a little more challenging when it was quantity and we were maybe helping him with a project and he said, Hey, go get me a couple three nails and we’d look at each other like, what’s that?

How many is that?

Right.

Because you’re inevitably gonna pick the wrong number when Yeah.

What we just bring the tray.

What about him?

Was he from Arizona or somewhere else?

No.

My dad was born and raised around the Fargo area in North Dakota.

Okay.

And then in his twenties moved on down to Wall, South Dakota for several years.

Okay.

That’s right.

Martha, we know quite a bit about this.

Yeah.

Well a couple three is something that you can’t analyze too closely because it’s this deliberately vague small number that that means something like two or three or maybe a few more.

I mean I mean it it’s kind of a a squishy expression.

It’s sprinkled throughout the United States, particularly in the north, so I’m interested that he was in the Dakotas there.

And sometimes you see it as a couple or three or a couple three just just couple.

Couple two three.

-huh, couple two three, or couple of three different variations in the phrasing, but it basically just works as a quantifying adjective, like some or several or many.

It goes right in front of the noun that it modifies and so you might say a couple three days or or like he like you said, a couple three hours, something like that.

Or you might call it an approximator.

It’s something that just gestures at the quantity without really committing to one.

So it’s not really trying to count anything.

But yeah, plenty of people use it and and Grant I understand that that it’s this kind of construction is also seen in other languages.

Yeah, that’s right.

It kind of works as a range.

So in the Scandinavian languages and Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Catalan, Latvian, they all have a construction, sometimes more common than than in one language than another, that almost literally translates to a couple three.

And then in languages like French, Spanish, and Russian, they also have well they’ll just say in French they’ll say Dutro or Spanish say Dostres.

So they just put the numbers right next to each other or in Russian it’s Dra tree or Polish Dva Shi.

It’s just the two numbers smashed together gives exactly the same impact as your father giving you these vague instructions for nails.

It’s just like, maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, somewhere in between.

Very interesting.

Well thank you very much for taking my question and thank you for your show.

I learned something every single time I learned.

Oh, that’s nice.

Well thanks for listening.

And call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, give us a couple three calls in the future.

Okay, there it is.

A couple of three calls.

You got it.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye, Jennifer.

If you want to know more about these kind of approximate numbers, we have a great segment on hyperbolic numbers, just search for it on our website at waywordradio.org.