Did I not get the memo about "couple of" ?

In My Humble Opinion
41

If you look for actual logical consistency between different types of speech like you’re doing here, you’re on a fool’s errand.

First, the language itself contains many inconsistencies. Why, for example, does “ough” sound different in cough, enough, through, thought, and drought?

Second, the fact that “couple” means two doesn’t mean that they are used identically in sentence construction. “Pair” also means two - would you say that you bought a pair shoes, or a pair of shoes? A “brace” is also two of something, and the correct usage is “a brace of.” A duet suggests two, as does a duo, and yet, because they are nouns and not adjectives (just like couple) convention suggests the need for an intervening preposition if we’re going to attach them to some particular things.

Right, but it seems to me that it’s important to draw a distinction between speaking and writing, especially more formal writing. For example, when people say “would have” in regular speech, the speed of the conversation often makes it sound like “would’ve,” and a lot of people also hear it as “would of.”

That’s completely fine. Unless you’re delivering a really formal speech, we all understand that everyday conversation often involves elisions and apparent contractions that we would not make in formal writing.

But while i would never correct a student who says “would’ve” in conversation, even if it sounds a bit like “would of,” i still do correct them when they write “would of” in an essay or some other piece of work that they submit in my class.

But “couple” versus “couple of” is not quite the same thing, because it’s clearly used intentionally (not just as a sort of accidental speaking elision) in both spoken form and in written form. I have no problem with “pairsa” or “coupla” in everyday speech, because they’re products of the vagaries and imprecisions of off-the-cuff speech. I’d be willing to bet, though, that neither of you would write those things in, say, a job application.

42

Speech patterns are not random, and while inconsistencies abound, consistencies abound at least as much.

That’s spelling, which is an entirely different thing.

“Pair” and “couple” are not synonymous with each other, so not seeing a problem there. OTOH, “couple” and 2 are identical. A better example is “dozen”, which means precisely 12. I bought a dozen apples. I bought 12 apples.

ETA: But it fails at “gross”. I bought a gross apples. BZZZZT!! But “gross” not phrasing that is at all common in the US.

Not standard American usage. Most Americans wouldn’t even know what it meant.

I’m speaking strictly of American usage.

43

It is “different than.”

44

But if “dozen” means precisely 12, why not say “I bought dozen apples”? After all, you wouldn’t say “I bought a 12 apples.”

And if it does, indeed, fail at gross, as you claim, then i would ask you why that is the case. There is no more or less inherent logic to saying “a gross (of) apples” than there is to saying “a dozen (of) apples” or “a couple (of) apples.” Indeed, the OED’s etymology section on “dozen” suggests that “dozen of” was the original preferred term.

Your pair-couple dismissal also seems more about what is convenient for your own preference than anything else. The fact that we use couple in some cases where we might or would not use pair doesn’t mean that the two words don’t still share an important meaning, as a collective noun for two things. There is no logical reason, apart from habit, why “a pair shoes” is less logical than “a couple apples.”

Your argument about brace’s obscurity in America also seems a little too convenient. Most Brits and Aussies probably don’t know what brace (in this context) means either, but the ignorance of the general population doesn’t mean that it isn’t a word, and that there aren’t preferred ways to use it.

I’ve never denied that “couple” without the “of” is a relatively common American usage. I’m merely suggesting that defending it using an argument about correct or logical structure, as you’re doing, seems to be a rather pointless exercise. If you’re a descriptivist who believes that usage is shaped primarily by custom and by what seems to work in the general population, it needs no such justification anyway, and is largely a matter of preference and habit. And if you lean descriptivist, and prefer that language work by some clearly laid out rules, then most of the rules of grammar and usage would suggest that, as a noun, “couple” requires an intervening preposition if it’s going to be used in this way.

45

I feel a sense of solidarity with you. If there is any way I can help you, I would be most happy to try.

46

Not in my dialect. “A couple” and “a few” are identical for me, when speaking of number.

47

There’s a fairly broad continuum of bad writing which might remain comprehensible through many levels of bad, but as it gets worse it forces the reader to expend increasingly more effort to understand it. It eventually reaches the point where it’s either entirely incomprehensible or takes major mental gymnastics to decode. Bad writing can be anywhere on that scale. Rules of grammar, spelling, and usage really do exist for a reason and not just as some academic formality. And I always think that making the reader have to work to understand you represents a kind of contempt, like serving someone a meal on dirty and cracked dishes.

I assume you meant it’s “subjective”, which is true. But good creative writing is art, and its merit may indeed be subjective but is defined much the same way as any other art form – by a consensus of approval.

Language is not a natural phenomenon, it’s a man-made intellectual creation. We nudge it all the time when we teach and encourage literacy and competent writing. That said, I grant you that systematic errors from ignorance and language fads do seem to arise like some spontaneous mutation and if they persist, they eventually have to be accepted by the official arbiters. But we can still take a position of either promoting the mutation or discouraging it. I have the sense that we’ve been fairly successful at so ridiculing the “my friend and me are …” construction that we don’t hear it as much any more, and in fact people are now going overboard and using “I” when “me” is actually correct!

I’m not actually pessimistic about the future of the English language and have made no dire predictions. I just dislike the rampant illiteracy I see all the time, something that the Internet has exposed on an unprecedented scale. I’ve been accused of being an annoying prescriptivist, but I dislike it for the reason I just mentioned – because it’s a carelessness that demonstrates contempt for the reader. It’s saying “I’m just going to do this brain dump in the easiest possible way for me, and leave you to figure it out, because you’re not worth even the miniscule time and effort it takes for me to construct a proper sentence.” Either that or it’s saying “I’m an illiterate idiot but you still have to listen to me”.

48

Yet, “then” still is not the same as “than”. So far, anyway.

49

My bad on “subjective” versus “objective.” And “then” versus “than.” And whatever mistakes I’m apt to make in the following post.

But wolfpup, you’ve argued yourself in a circle. You’ve said that English speakers from previous centuries would be impressed by how refined and precise English is now. You’ve also said that mutations in language need to be protected against, to prevent the language from degrading. But if you think language has improved over the last thousand plus years - what exactly do you imagine the mechanism for that improvement was? That’s right - the exact process you’re now arguing needs to be opposed. If people who hold your position had won the day in the past, we’d all still be speaking Middle English.

Language evolves, and the process is in many ways similar to biological evolution. Everyday, the entire world is a crucible for language, in which every word and phrase is constantly tested to see if it can be improved, altered, or discarded. It is precisely this process of constant experimentation and refinement that made the language what it is today - what on Earth makes you think that right now is when it needs to stop, that today, of all days, is the day when we got it “just right,” and any further change is only going to make it worse?

50

I used to talk like that, but somehow I was broken of the habit. “A couple” no longer gets used to mean anything but two, by me or anyone I know. Not sure whether it was a person (teacher, relative, whoever) or if I read something that convinced me to knock it off.

But it is not exactly like “two” or “a few” because neither of those words get used as a verb. In that way, “couple” is rather similar to “pair” but has one or more usages that diverge even from that word.

51

Oh, Hell!
Can we just agree, “As Chaucer is, so shall Dryden be.”?

52

I just want to clarify that I’m not advocating that we try to freeze the language and I’m under no illusions that we ever could. I think the richness of the English language stems from factors like cross-pollination from other languages and the work of some very talented writers, and those are all good things. But a lot of the bizarre inconsistencies in the language stem from its incompetent use by dumbasses, although granted that some is due to the foreign-language provenance of some of our words. All I’m saying is that we should be discouraging the incompetence.

53

I’m not quite so sure that his argument is quite as inconsistent as you’re suggesting here.

To the extent that language has improved, especially written language, it has often improved through regularization, with the increasing precision and predictability of spelling and punctuation and stuff like that. And i don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I understand that language evolves, and that the evolution can create a more vibrant and interesting language, but at the same time i think we benefit from having rules and stability and predictability, and from discouraging the linguistic iconoclasm, often based in ignorance of the conventions themselves, that leads to what were once considered examples of illiteracy becoming part of everyday use.

Note that, for me at least, this is more about formal writing than about all different uses of language. As i’ve already made clear in this thread, there are usages that i find completely unproblematic in speech and even in informal writing, but that i think should be avoided in formal writing. Part of knowing and understanding a language is understanding when certain types of usage are appropriate and when they aren’t.

I’m not interested in absolutist prescriptivism, or in discouraging any and all shifts in usage. But nor am i interested in a radicalized descriptivism that accepts any and every change, even if rooted in complete ignorance or simple misunderstanding, as a valid and useful addition to the language. I think that Bryan Garner, the author of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, gets the balance about right, and David Foster Wallace’s fantastic review (PDF) of Garner’s book in Harper’s back in 2001 represents, in my opinion, a brilliant effort to elucidate and to mediate the competition between authority and democracy in the development of American-English usage. Wallace acknowledges his own intellectual elitist attitude to usage, but i think he makes a solid case that Garner manages to convey authority while also remaining sympathetic to the democratic shifts of the language.

54

I don’t know if I’m right or not, just offering an opinion. But it seems odd that you chastise me for looking for some small consistency in language usage and then tell me my idea doesn’t make sense because it’s inconsistent with other usage. There is probably some reason that Americans have dropped the “of”, so what’s your idea as to why? We can speculate that it’s just random drift in language usage, but that doesn’t seem particularly satisfying.

55

Sure, i understand that. But there are different types of consistency, and some conventions, i think, need to be addressed before others. For me, the basic status of couple as a noun and not an adjective means it should take the preposition.

But my main point was really to suggest that, if you’re going to look for consistency in order to buttress what really is little more than an opinion, then it is just as easy for someone else to come along and to find a different set of consistencies to support their preferred usage.

I understand that, even if i attempt to justify it by appeal to logic and consistency, my preference for “couple of” is mainly a product of habit, and of my upbringing outside of the United States. Recognizing this, i tend not to correct my students when they use couple as an adjective, although many of them seem to use the word as a sort of a synonym for “a few,” and in those cases i encourage them to be more precise about exactly what they are describing. If a student writes that “Franklin Roosevelt introduced a couple government programs during the New Deal,” i probably won’t correct the usage, but i will tell the student to be more specific and detailed with his or her historical analysis.

It is worth nothing that i’ve asked a bunch of my American friends about the American use of “couple” over the years, and most of them also think that using “couple” as an adjective is poor usage. I’m not arguing that you should pay attention to these people, or that they are smarter than people who support your position, but they are people who do spend much of their working lives both reading and writing, and who take an active interest in the quality of written expression.

56

And all your reasons are factually incorrect. People have no more trouble understanding each other than before. People who speak do in fact try to be understood–otherwise there is no point of speaking. And there is absolutely no rampant illiteracy–literacy is only getting better. And how you choose to speak or write has nothing to do with literacy.

And now you’re assuming contempt when there is not even a shred of evidence of such contempt. It’s like those people who claim that people who always run late show contempt for others. No, they have trouble with being on time, and it has nothing to do with you.

Likewise, the choice to use language you have trouble understanding (or that you do understand perfectly but want to rant about) has nothing to do with you. I write in a colloquial way to be understood by more people, and to not communicate that I am some sort of stuck up snob who must always use formal language.