Originally posted by Barg
"They walk among us, they breed, and they vote" - Oh, the humanity!
At the Woolies supermarket the other day buying my weekly baccy supplies. I usually buy 3 packets of Drum (Yeah, I know, I know - they should warn folks of the danger; puts some adds on the TV and bill-boards on the road. Spare me!) In any case, on this day I only required two packets. The gals were busy, so got served by the young manager (yes, the manager).
I said, "May I have a couple of packets of drum?" To which he replied, "How many is a couple?"
Rolling my eyes, I said to him, "Are your parents a couple?"
"I guess so," he responded.
"Excellent! How many parents do you have?"
He looked at me with a confused expression. "I have two," he answered.
"Jolly good show, son. Therein lies the answer to this complex mathematical equation."
Sadly, this is a true story.
The phrase a couple of, meaning “a smallnumber of; a few; several,” has been in standarduse for centuries, especially with measurementsof time and distance and in referring to amountsof money: They walked a couple of miles in silence. Repairs will probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. The phrase is used in all but themost formal speech and writing. The shortenedphrase a couple, without of ( The gas station is a couple miles from here ), is an Americanism of recent development that occurs chiefly in informal speech or representations of speech,especially when followed by number terms (as a couple dozen eggs ) or units of measurement (as a couple years ago; a couple gallons of gas ). Thisuse of couple (as an adjective or modifier) is stilldisliked by many. Without a following noun, a couple is even more informal: Jack shouldn'tdrive. It's clear he's had a couple. (Here the noundrinks is omitted.) In referring to two people, couple, like manycollective nouns, may take either a singular or a plural verb. Most commonly, it is construed as a plural: The couple were traveling to Texas. Seealso collective noun.
