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Surprising people think this then always say “you are a cute couple” or “you make a good married couple.”
by developerDan 3y ago
Surprising people think this then always say “you are a cute couple” or “you make a good married couple.”
- cgriswald 3y agoPeople regularly use “couple” to make it sound like less. “I only had a couple of beers, officer.” “Hey, can I borrow a couple bucks?”
- dylan604 3y agoMaybe we should start asking someone to grab a throuple of things from the store
- bdowling 3y agoIs a throuple more or fewer than a treble?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoThat's a completely different context.
- satvikpendem 3y agoHow so? A couple (of people) derives from the same meaning of the word couple, meaning two. It's the exact same context as comparing a couple of anything else.
- tikhonj 3y ago"Couple" implies a specific sort of relationship between two people—there are lots of pairs of people, even pairs who know each other, that we would never refer to as "couples"! That's a distinct meaning from "couple" as in "couple of apples", where it really does just mean "two".
- satvikpendem 3y agoSure, but I'm talking about the etymology and origin of the word couple as in people, which derives from the same word as couple, as in two. I'm not saying anything about the sociological relationship of a couple versus a pair of people.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoYour etymology is correct, but that has no bearing on the fact that the word has multiple distinct meanings, which is very typical of English. It actually has at least three: (1) A small number of things (roughly 2) (2) Two people in some sort of relationship (3) to join or connect (two) things together Even though each is obviously derived from the fact that two things are involved, that wouldn't even cross the mind of a native speaker hearing the word in different contexts and assuming the right meaning.
- vel0city 3y agoOne can have n-way couplings though. https://www.amazon.com/Coupling-Garden-Fitting-Adaptor-Connectors/dp/B01KFJF96A https://www.amazon.com/Coupling-Garden-Fitting-Adaptor-Conne...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GloomyBoots 3y agoI think what’s happening here isn’t really regional at all. It’s a kind of confusion that can happen anywhere within the Anglosphere. We have a word, “couple” which means exactly two things. But unlike “one” or “two”, children don’t tend to ever actually be directly told that “couple” means exactly two things, they just pick it up naturally. People like playing with language, and use understatement regularly. Unlike “I’ll just have two beers”, where it’s obvious to any child who has learned to count that this is the case, when kids regularly see people around them say “I’ll just have a couple of beers”, they assume couple is another word for an indeterminate small amount like few. When they later learn of other uses of “couple” they assume these are unrelated.
- TylerE 3y agoCouple in that case refers to the, erm, act.
- bregma 3y agoPerhaps they are just less judgemental about polyamory.