[koeselitz]

Sorry, this is apropos of nothing, but...

<grammar fanboy>In this article Lee quotes the Light Table demo as saying that it was accomplished with "with just a few lines of CSS and JavaScript," and then remarks that "I was curious as to the contents of those 3 lines as they must be the most powerful 3 lines of code ever written. In actual fact, the JavaScript file that drives the demo is 700 lines long."

What in god's name makes people assume that "a few" means "three?" "A few" just means exactly what it says: a relatively small number. Two is actually a relatively small number in certain circumstances, so you could say "a few" to mean "two." In this circumstance, 700 lines of code could be said to be "a few" lines, because I've seen full Javascript apps that use 7000 lines.

I don't really care about the trivial Flash/HTML5 contentiousness, and I'd rather stay out of it. But I keep encountering these weird misapprehensions based on imaginary rules concerning the phrase "a few," and it seems silly to me. </grammar fanboy>

[endtime]

I took a graduate philosophy seminar as a senior and we spent a full lecture debating the semantics and pragmatics of fuzzy quantifiers like this. There was a sizable portion of the class that felt that "few" is a relative term (as in "few people believe in aliens"), but that "a few" is an absolute term (as in "I cooked a few eggs").

You may be a "grammar fanboy", but I don't think your proposed semantics of "a few" are necessarily correct.

[koeselitz]

Oh, I agree that my own perspectives on "a few" aren't necessarily correct. And "grammar fanboy" was just self-deprecation, not an indication of expertise; everybody uses grammar, so everybody is as much an 'expert' in how it should and shouldn't be used as anybody else.

What I was commenting on was the apparent accretions of personal "rules" surrounding the use of the phrase "a few" colloquially. Sure, when I say "I cooked a few eggs," there's a context; people know I wouldn't cook 7000 eggs, so they would never assume that's what I meant. But I have in fact been chided by people pedantically when I've said something like "I cooked a few eggs," meaning two; in this case, people have often said to me that what I really mean is that I cooked a couple eggs, as "a few" is apparently distinct from "a couple."

All I'm saying is: there aren't necessarily little rules governing when people can and can't use the phrase "a few." I object whenever I'm told that I really shouldn't use "a few" to mean "a relatively small amount;" why not? Maybe Apple's mention of "a few lines of CSS and Javascript" in the article really does imply only and exactly three, but I can't see how. It's possible that there are agreed-upon linguistic usages that mean that Apple is actually lying, but it seems to me much more likely that "a few" is just a phrase that's more fluid and less strict than Lee is taking it to be. Chiding people for using "a few" to mean "relatively few" rather than "always and only three" seems silly to me.

[endtime]

I think most people have the intuition that 2 is a couple, a few is strictly greater than a couple, and several is weakly greater than a few.

In any case, in this context, I think it's safe to say that "a few lines of Javascript" implies something on the order of 3-10, rather than 700; I do think Apple was being misleading. Just because the upper bound on something (like the size of a JS library) is high doesn't mean that the phrase "a few" can mean 700...it certainly doesn't scale linearly. At least, that's my intuition, but I'd be pretty surprised if I'm an outlier here.

[what]

Although I don't think "a few" is an exact quantity, I don't agree with the definition of "relatively small" either. If I take 7000 line and compare it to 70,000 lines, 7K becomes relatively small and I could then call it "a few" lines.

Think about how people use the term. "I'm having a few people over for a bbq." Or "I ate a few cookies." Would you ever expect to see 700 people at the bbq or that the person ate 700 cookies? I think if you were to ask people "how many is 'a few'?" The answer would likely be a number greater than 1 and less than 10. Or maybe a range within 1 and 10.