Couple, Few, and Several

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello. My name is Michael. I’m calling from Eureka, California.

All right.

What can we do for you?

Yeah, it’s really great.

Well, I have a sort of a long-running mild dispute in my family concerning the words couple, few, and several.

Oh.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, we’ve kind of, you know, they’re defined rather loosely.

Well, a couple has a pretty definite definition to it. You know, it basically means two.

But a lot of times in just casual use of those three words, people can mean the same thing for all three of them or something very different.

And for some reason I decided I was going to kind of apply a definition that I thought would give the family and I something to go on as we were talking about whatever we needed to talk about, like pass me a couple of slices of bread or I need several more seconds or something.

So I suggested that the definitions would be that a couple was obviously two, but every once in a while, because they’re used loosely, could be maybe three.

That a few sounded a little bit like five. So centering it on five, I thought, well, it could be less, like four.

It could be more like six and several sounds like seven. So I thought, well, it could be as few as six and as many as maybe, I don’t know, up to almost a dozen. Yeah, yeah, that is exactly the way I’ve always thought.

What? Yes, yes, I don’t, I mean, Michael, how did your family take that? I don’t. Oh, there was a dispute. They were like going, what? Like, yeah, yeah, a few is five. Five isn’t a few. I don’t know why.

If he was definitely not two, it might be three. It could be four. It’s definitely not five. Michael, I don’t know why. I always thought the same thing, and I have no good reason why except for the letters.

But several is seven? Around seven. Seven is when you don’t know how many exactly there are, but there could be from, like, three to 20. Now, where did you get these rules, Grant? I’m just saying, like, in my experience.

In your experience. Well, here’s the thing. Here’s how you figure this out. I’m just going to say that there’s gigantic arguments about this all the time on the Internet. On the Internet, they argue about everything.

The way you figure this out is find all the times that people have used a couple, a few, and several in print, and then go try to figure out exactly how many there were after they used the word.

Do you think we could get a big grant for that?

No, probably not.

A government grant?

No, this grant for zero dollars.

That’s what you’ll get.

When you look at the way people speak, if you look at transcripts of what people have said, what you tend to find is when they use these vague terms like this, they later restate themselves and become more specific.

Really?

So between the different ways that they’ve described ever how many there are, you can come up with a more accurate picture of the total quantity at hand.

Yeah.

You might even have people say, well, there were a few Saturdays that we went to the pool. And then a little later they say, several Saturdays I know for sure we went to the pool. And then you can kind of see that in their mind, a few and a several have some overlap.

Well, maybe they went to the pool a couple of times in between.

No, I’m just kidding.

Michael, I would love to see this represented visually. I think I need to see a graph or something of this.

Well.

There’s some overlap, definitely. It might be a survey. We’ll see.

Right.

Ooh, a survey.

Yes, yes.

Grant can do this online.

Why don’t you do that, Grant?

We’ll see.

We’ll get you a big grant to do it.

That would be good.

Well, Mike, thanks for calling today. We’re glad to talk to you about this. We’ll see what the community has to say.

All right.

It’ll be interesting.

Thank you.

Well, aren’t we a couple of knuckleheads?

Several people have told me that. And by that, I don’t mean seven. I mean 700.

Call us. What’s the dispute in your family about words and language and grammar and slang and things that you should say and shouldn’t say?

1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.