[Ads-l] Ever pondered this question?

[Geoffrey Nathan]

Finally getting a chance to respond to this. Until Margaret and I discussed this I had never noticed that I had an apparently idiosyncratic meaning for ‘several’. I somehow picked up that it meant ‘two’. Thus, ‘a few’ was generally more than ‘several’. I even had my own folk etymology—if you cut something in half, you ‘severed’ it…

I’m not making this up. But at some point, apparently I did.

To quote Wilson, ‘you never know…’

Geoff

Geoffrey S. Nathan
WSU Information Privacy Officer (Retired)
Emeritus Professor, Linguistics Program
http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/
geoffnathan at wayne.edu

From: Wilson Gray<mailto:hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2020 12:00 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU<mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Ever pondered this question?

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Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Ever pondered this question?
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An old Army buddy, Nolan, writes about another old Army buddy, Bill:
"He believed that _few_ was greater than _several_ and, as recently as last
week, I've been asking people about that comparison."

That is to say that he's been pondering this question since we were
students at the Army Language School, in 1960!

FWIW, IMO, _few_ is *less* than _several_.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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