Script for August 24, 2001
 

A listener wrote in asking for help with the word "couple." She writes, "[My Grandma and I] disagree about the definition of 'couple' as term of measurement. She says, 'A couple' is always two." [I say when someone] says, 'I have a couple things to do,' . . . 'couple' . . . has the same meaning as 'few.'"

We have a couple of thoughts on this topic. We'd bet neither our correspondent nor her grandmother knew that using couple to mean "two" was itself once the cause of some controversy.

Back in the 19th century, a couple of usage writers claimed that since couple has its origin in the Latin word for bond, the noun should be used not merely to mean "two," but to mean "two united, as it were, by links." But by then, folks had been using a couple of synonymously with two for five hundred years, and this etymological fallacy didn't have much of an impact.

Commentators then shifted position. Either they claimed a couple of was a colloquialism or they insisted couple should only mean "two" and never an indefinite, small number. To confuse things further, one commentator argued that couple should only mean "few" and never mean "two." But since all of these senses can be found in the writings of everyone from H.L. Mencken to E.B. White, we don't think careful writers need to waste more than a couple of seconds hesitating over the usage.

Provided by Tarjomeh.com from  Merriam-Webster Website