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by koeselitz
5857 days ago
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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. |
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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.