Couple vs. Pair

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Noah Muthart from Elk Rapids, Michigan. How are you guys today?

Doing well, Noah. How are you?

Noah, welcome to the show.

Thanks. I had a question about the word couple.

I recently came up with my dad. I was talking to him.

And I said, you know, I had a couple of things to do before I could help him out with what he needed help with.

And he was confused why I had more than two things to do before I could help him out with his project.

I think that the word couple over time has evolved into meaning more than simply two objects or two things.

And I was wondering what you guys thought about that.

What’s his argument that it only means two?

Yeah, it only means two things.

If you say a couple, a couple has a very narrow definition, and it means that there’s only two things.

When you tell your father, give me a minute, I’ll help you when I’m done with this,

Does he think a minute is exactly 60 seconds?

That’s a good question. I guess I’d have to ask him.

Yeah, or give me a couple minutes.

I mean, sometimes I hear what I want to hear, I think.

I totally hear what I want to hear. Give me five minutes.

That’s a half hour.

Yeah, there we go.

What are you talking about?

There are a lot of these approximated times and quantity designations in English that cause a great deal of difficulty for even native speakers.

If you look at transcripts of natural speech where people don’t really know that they’re being studied for linguistic features,

People will spend something like, I forget what it is, some staggering amount of time in any conversation in clarifying and disambiguating and trying to figure out what the other person meant.

I mean, a huge amount of speech is only disambiguation and clarification.

And so this is one of those classic cases.

But Grant, what if I said, you know, Grant, you owe me a couple of dollars.

Oh, well, dollars, I’m going to be particular about, right, because it matters.

And where the couple stops mattering and stops having to be exactly two is when the outcome isn’t much changed by whether or not it’s actually three or maybe even four, right?

Another question to ask your father, besides if he thinks a minute is always exactly 60 seconds, is how many is a pair?

Because pair in almost everyone’s speech is completely precise.

It means exactly two.

Unless you’re talking about a pair of underwear.

Oh, interesting.

Well, two pair of underwear holds is how I think about it, right?

One for each leg, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I always have a problem with that.

Like when I’m writing sometimes, you know, I don’t know, say like a pair of shorts or a pair of pants.

Because really, I mean, it’s only one article of clothing.

Right.

Pair of scissors.

How many scissors do you want?

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Let me equip you with a couple other things to go back to your father with or anyone else who’s arguing about this.

Because believe me, this is like the two spaces after a period conversation.

And it can go on for years with people.

Couple is highly context dependent.

And when you talk about the meaning of couple,

You have to talk about the sentence that it appears in.

You cannot only talk about the word standing by itself

Or you’re basically being intellectually dishonest.

You just have to talk about it in the context.

So that’s really super important.

The second thing to go to your father with is to point out that when we talk about a couple of and then some time period,

Like a couple of minutes or a couple of days,

We have a problem of not knowing when exactly we’re starting the counting.

So if I say, Martha, in a couple of days I’m going to go to Paris, you don’t know if I mean exactly 48 hours or after the rest of today and all of tomorrow and then I’m going, or do I mean after two midnights when we actually traditionally separate two days on the calendar, right?

So we have these three possible meanings and all of them have a different length of hours.

So I would go back to your father and say, are you greatly injured by the fact that I actually had three things to do instead of two?

Well, yeah, he was waiting on him.

I mean, that’s the thing, right?

He probably was hearing what he wanted to hear.

Two things.

Yeah, exactly.

He does that a lot.

Oh, he does that a lot.

Okay.

Yeah, he likes to hear what he wants to hear.

I think that’s the human condition.

Isn’t it the human condition, though?

We all want everything our own way.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess we can’t blame him too much.

One more thing, Noah, to take back to your father,

Is that if he’s looking for logic in English,

Then he’s got a problem because couple,

Like so many other words in English, has more than one meaning.

And it’s an informal meaning, and it’s a slangy meaning,

But couple has long often met more than two.

Okay?

Yep.

I mean, in many, many, many situations,

In the writing of our best speakers,

And in the speeches of our best speakers.

So I’d say you’re off the hook, Noah.

Good.

Thanks a lot for calling.

Yeah, thanks for talking to me.

All right, take care now.

Let us know how it turns out, all right?

Yeah, I will.

All right, cheers.

Okay, bye-bye.

Yep, bye.

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