cvs commit: www/en index.xsl

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Wes Peters wrote:

> > : "A couple" is numerically equivalent to "a pair".
> >
> > A couple isn't quite the same as a pair.  A secondary meaning for a
> > couple is the same as a few.  "Give me a couple of those biscuits" is
> > likely to get you 3 biscuits as 2 in many parts of the US.
> 
> Funny, I've lived just about everywhere in the US (except Texas) and "a
> couple" has always meant two.  "A few" would be 2 to 5, several would be
> 4 or 5 to maybe a dozen, etc., all the way up to "buttload" which is
> rougly "more than a man can carry." 
> 
> 2 or more seems to be what we really want here.  A parenthetical "X
> floppies for i386 as of this writing" will help the reader to grasp the
> scale at some ill-specified point in time. 

When I say "Hold on, I'll be there in a couple of minutes", I hardly ever
mean two, and that seems to apply to a lot of people I know also :-). 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research