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7 votes
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The town where holding fireworks over your head is a tradition
6 votes -
The melancholy decline of the semicolon
17 votes -
Pompeii still has buried secrets - The first major excavations in decades shed light on how ordinary citizens shopped and snacked—and where slaves slept
6 votes -
The surprisingly strange history of Thanksgiving (and other turkey day trivia)
4 votes -
Disney’s FastPass: A complicated history
14 votes -
Longstanding discourse w/ my SO about the phrase "a couple of..."
#couple Defined as: noun: couple; plural noun: couples 1. two individuals of the same sort considered together. "a couple of girls were playing marbles" a pair of partners in a dance or game....
#couple
Defined as:noun:
couple;plural noun: couples1.
two individuals of the same sort considered together.
"a couple of girls were playing marbles"a pair of partners in a dance or game.
MECHANICSa pair of equal and parallel forces acting in opposite directions, and tending to cause rotation about an axis perpendicular to the plane containing them.
2.
two people who are married, engaged, or otherwise closely associated romantically or sexually.
"in three weeks the couple fell in love and became engaged"3.INFORMALan indefinite small number.
"he hoped she'd be better in a couple of days"
verb:couple;3rd person present:couplespast tense:coupledpast participle:coupledgerund or present participle:coupling1.
combine."a sense of hope is coupled with a palpable sense of loss"
join to form a pair.
"the beetles may couple up to form a pair"2.
mate or have sexual intercourse.
"as middle-class youth grew more tolerant of sex, they started to couple more often"
#Discourse of the use of the word/phrase in this particular case
You
"how many would you like?"
Them
"just a couple."
When someone requests 'a couple of...' I respond with something similar to: 'How many do you want specifically?', which leads to the discourse of, 'A couple is two, a few is >2, several is <x' and so on.
I agree with the first two clearly stated definitions of 'couple', but in the informal use of a couple (eg. a depiction of a quantity) is not specifically two...nor is 'a few' three. How many specifically is several..?
I understand the semantics within the conversation. But, the expectation of understanding that two, and only two, is implied in the use of the phrase 'a couple' in a request; is ambiguously stating what one party desires. I'm the asshole now, just tell me how many you want.
And now...your thoughts, please.
12 votes -
Where the humanities aren't in crisis
3 votes -
The ancient origins of glass
4 votes -
The Varangian Guard | Units of History
5 votes -
America's forgotten vampire panic
7 votes -
Search for Jimmy Hoffa leads the FBI to Jersey City landfill
8 votes -
Machine learning for moral judgments
3 votes -
The jet that terrified the West: The MiG-25 Foxbat
7 votes -
The name for Britain comes from our ancient love of tattoos
6 votes -
Liberal hypocrisy is fueling American inequality. Here’s how.
15 votes -
Music and Connection -- Yo-Yo Ma
4 votes -
How many people have Q Clearance?
10 votes -
The ingenious ancient technology concealed in the shallows
7 votes -
David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
11 votes -
French Catholics agree to sell property to compensate abuse victims
9 votes -
Decolonizing Idaho’s road signs - A new effort will add Indigenous history to historical markers across the state
4 votes -
An extraordinary 500-year-old shipwreck is rewriting the history of the age of discovery
10 votes -
Ace Linguist: Dialect Dissection: ABBA
5 votes -
WWII animated: Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-1941
4 votes -
Improving MIT’s written commitment to freedom of expression
4 votes -
The SAS Iranian Embassy siege, 1980 - Animated
5 votes -
This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first US Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.
8 votes -
A very quick lesson on the southern accent
5 votes -
Against the stoics, skeptics, epicureans, and buddhists
6 votes -
Much of what you've heard about Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan is wrong
11 votes -
Dead as a doornail
3 votes -
American unreality - In breaking the link between politics and objective truth, the United States seeks to fashion a new world – but it is one built on shifting sands
3 votes -
Portugal’s insane plan to double its territory
3 votes -
Were the Norse the first to settle the Azores? Seafarers may have come and gone from lush archipelago more than 1000 years ago
7 votes -
Gender in Latin and beyond
3 votes -
Critical race theory and moral panic
13 votes -
Nearly 500 Mesoamerican monuments revealed by laser mapping—many for the first time
5 votes -
Tolerance by Accident, Trust by Design
3 votes -
What is Day of the Dead?
2 votes -
Human history gets a rewrite
13 votes -
Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021
5 votes -
Epistemology of the Internet — and of traditional media
6 votes -
Why some White evangelicals are rethinking their politics
12 votes -
Part of a Spitfire which was shot down over Norway during World War II has gone on display after being restored
5 votes -
The tiger and the strawberry
4 votes -
Why proving someone wrong often backfires
5 votes -
When hope is a hindrance
6 votes -
Repeatedly clicking the first link on Wikipedia ends up at "Philosophy" 97% of the time
27 votes -
The American Aristotle
2 votes