That petition is clearly somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
I think I may have once met a person here in the US who equated “several” with “seven,” but I don’t think it’s a widespread thing at all. “Several” means, I dunno, like around five, give or take a couple.
Remembered vaguely from one of those “Sovereign Citizen Gets TASED!” videos:
SOVCIT: I do not consent to the jurisdiction of the United States government or any of its several states!
POLICE OFFICER: There’s more than seven…
People mortally confused about a given thing are likely to make their presence disproportionately noticed by asking pained questions, for sure.
Well, ‘I could murder a…’ can be applied to anything you are desperate to consume - could be a burger, a negroni, a cappuccino, you name it really. Generally anything of a moreish or addictive quality. Not sure you’d apply it to a quinoa salad, but I suppose someone must fantasise about them.
No, it actually originated in the Stone Age—the Modern Stone Age, if you want to be precise.
Did you perhaps pronounce or spell “several” as “sevenal”? English accents can be tricky to figure out, after all!
Mmmm. No.
Did chatgpt write that?
I saw that Carry On movie, but never made the connection. Don’t know if my parents did. But if they were chuffed to goolies, they kept it to themselves.
No, I don’t believe ChatGPT is from New Jersey.
Not the last paragraph, obviously.
If that film had been made 30 years ago, they would’ve said fag. Got to remember the American
market !
“I could murder a tart” was used as the punchline to a Jack the ripper joke, and later
the same joke applied to the Yorkshire ripper.
Spike Milligan used the phrase “several or eightal times” in one of his short stories.
If it is, this is the first and only time I (and Eyebrows) have heard of it
Same here. I have never heard this usage in my 63 years.
In a Goon Show episode, one of his characters observes that the footbridge is under seven inches of rain. Another character corrects him: it’s actually the Severn Bridge that’s under foot inches of rain.
There was a distasteful joke about why Michael Barrymore doesn’t have any ash trays at his house.
Another American who has never heard “several” as meaning exactly seven, or even metaphorically seven. To me, it implies 3-6 for small sets, or 4-something-much-less-than-the-square-root-of-the-dataset for large data sets. For large datasets it could mean more than 7. Like if we were looking at 10,000 rows in a database, I could say “several of them have bogus data” if it were even up to like 12. I’d probably say “some” instead, though, even though it would be more accurate but less precise than “several”.
That is not generally how I measure the existence of phenomena.
Really? How peculiar. For most people the first recourse is to see how common the observation of phenomena is among themselves and their friends.
How many people besides yourself think several = seven.
That petition doesn’t count – it doesn’t claim this is a ommon usage;it just wants to define a specific value (which is anyithetical to the way the word is use to mean a vague number).
A quick look through online dictionaries finds none that give “seven” as a variant meaning for “dseveral”. Not even a rare or archaic one.
Some websites express disbelief that anyone could confuse the two, from which I gather that this is not unknown, but still a rare thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/survivor/comments/1b395lb/several_seven_debate/
I mean, I don’t measure the existence of something I have observed by whether or not you have heard of it. Your (or actually Eyebrows) assertion that something I have witnessed is ‘not a thing’ is not currency to me.
I don’t think several = seven. Why are you saying that I think that?
I have encountered numerous examples of people who thought that though, including some who argued about it. I wish I could show you all of the examples but it seems to have been pretty common for people to delete their comment after realising they were wrong. Here is one surviving example where they didn’t:
https://1drv.ms/i/s!Ar4eOUAx-yGwieEDGBC98R0YxIKfEA?e=ZGfGU
While you’re on reddit, the discussions underneath that topic reveal a number of people who comment to the effect “Yeah, I thought that too”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/survivor/comments/1b395lb/several_seven_debate/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/18tw537/what_numbers_do_you_think_of_when_someone_says/
https://www.reddit.com/r/confidentlyincorrect/comments/jrjem2/several_not_seven/
Of course it’s reddit, so you can’t be sure how serious anyone is, and it’s also unclear whether this is specific to any particular region.