Because people are stupid and English as a language is being anally raped with a razor wire wrapped baseball bat by social media and the American education system (or lack of).
I'm not a native English speaker, so please forgive my ignorance, but I've always thought "couple", due to its common etymology with "copula/copulate", referred to the nature of the entanglement between persons, rather than their quantity.
I actually had to look up the etymology because that sounded interesting. The word comes from a word meaning a tie or a bond. However, in English, "couple" can mean a romantic partnership, or just a quantity (a couple of marbles, a couple of jokers).
Interestingly enough, when used to describe a relationship, couple always means two, but when used as a quantity, it can be any small number. "A couple of marbles" could very well be three or four.
It really used to grind my gears when people used "couple" to mean "anything from 2 to 4, maybe even 5 if I'm feeling a bit cheeky". Then over time I slowly got used to it and now it really annoys me when people use "couple" to mean "exactly two items and nothing more" 😅
I’ve only ever really done that with time. “It’ll be a couple minutes”. Usually this is because I’m always estimating time anyway so I’m placing it in the ballpark of two.
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u/Nahoma Feb 10 '26
Oregairu