How many couples make a dozen: few or several?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
16 October 2011
A few weeks ago, I saw a newspaper headline that screamed: “Oil tanker explodes killing dozens”. Then the opening paragraph of the story read: “Police say at least three people have been confirmed dead and several others hospitalised with serious body burns when an oil tanker that had overturned in Busia went up in flames.”
Now, I have always thought that the word dozen means 12. For example, a length of one foot has a dozen inches. So how could anyone write “dozens” were killed when only three people are confirmed to have died?
Perhaps it was in attempt to sensationalise the story or may be the writer believes that a dozen is an undefined number. Whatever the reason, I am happy to report that the publication in question is not a member of the ‘Nation’ family.
This story reminded me of a time that when I once asked a fellow student to give me “a couple” of foolscaps to write on. I was surprised when he gave me only two sheets of paper – I expected to get a few more than that. When I asked him why he had given me just two, he responded that this was the number I had asked for and went on to explain that the word “couple” means two.
Of course it does! This is why a husband and a wife are called “a couple” – because they are two people. They might also be called “a pair”, but I guess “a couple” is more appropriate because it also means to join two things and the married couple is joined…in holy matrimony.
Nevertheless, many people use the phrase “a couple” when they mean “a few”. So, if a dozen is strictly 12 things and a couple is two, how many are “a few” and “several”. Indeed, would a few be more or less than several?
In my mind, the word few, should only be used when the number is five or less. The misleading headline appeared on 20th September 2011 so I feel justified to say that is was “a few weeks ago”. Had it been more than that, then I could have used the word “several”.
To me, “several” means a number close to seven. After all, the words have the same first four letters. Thus, in my mind, any number from six to nine fits that definition. Therefore, when I read in the newspaper story that “several others” were hospitalised after the fire accident, I understood that to be more than five but less than ten.
If I may recapitulate: for me, a couple means two (after a classmate pointed it out “many” years ago); a few is 3, 4, or 5; several is 6, 7, 8, or 9; and a dozen is 12. However, some times we also say “a number of” as well as “many”: what values do these have? When I say that I was in school “many years ago”, what duration comes to your mind?
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