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Penny Arcade - Comic - Elevenses
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Elevenses
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I have this argument with my wife every few months.
A "couple" means two.
A "few" means three.
"Several" is four or more, up to not more than six.
More than six and you have to move on to "many".
I have never considered after noon part until now.
Technically 11AM today is afternoon from yesterday. Bam! It's like the whole Gremlins problem, it's always after midnight somewhere. My Mogwai never make it more than a few weeks before I have to bury them in the backyard in a shoebox
You've got morning, which describes the time of day before noon, from sunrise to noon.
Then you've got noon, which marks mid-day and the end of morning.
Then you've got afternoon, which is a somewhat ambiguous term that just means sometime after mid-day but before evening starts.
Then you have evening, which generally means the later hours of the day that still has daylight.
You've got night, which is a general term for when it's dark outside.
Midnight is the opposite of noon and indicates the end of the day and the mid-point in the night cycle.
But there's no such thing as aftermidnight. You just have more night. Night exists on both sides of midnight. Whereas with noon, morning exists before it and afternoon exists after it.
I'd say morning can sometimes refer to any time between midnight and noon. The early hours of the morning. It was two in the morning. That kind of thing. So, day is sunrise to sunset; night is sunset to sunrise; morning is midnight to noon; and afternoon is noon to midnight?
I classify time like this.
4:00AM - 11:59AM = morning
12:00PM - 12:59PM = Noon
1:00PM - 5:59 = Afternoon
6:00 PM - 3:59AM = night
Good old Gremlins 2 , so what if he crosses a time zone.
I'm usually pretty strict about these things myself. But for some reason I've always held that "couple" can be two or three. Maybe it's because "two and two alone" already has a word, "pair". Also, fun fact! In Hebrew, there's a distinct plural suffix for two of something that comes in twos, like hands.
"Brace" means 2 also, but that doesn't make other words for 2 change. English has a lot of synonyms.
True, but we're talking about parlance more than definition. By definition, couple does not have to mean only two. If someone asked for a couple Cheetos I may give them three. It's an informal term. Now, I'm normally pretty anal about this sort of thing but for whatever reason I never had a problem with couple and few being interchangeable.
I say no I didn't, honey, I came home early this morning.
This just isn't true though. How would you describe 2am in words? Right, "two in the morning."
Nobody says "two oclock at night". Except savages.
Couple = Two
Few = Three to Four, maybe Five.
Several = Six or Seven.
A lot = Above that.
I work weird hours, which has on occasion caused "issues". I start at 1am. In the fucking morning. Some people, like a certain employee that we'll call Dumbass, seems to think that 1am is simply part of the night-time. A time where dreams and occasional half lucid trips to the bathroom happen, and not much else. So Dumbass takes a job where he starts at 1-in-the-night (to his way of thinking). So when I say he starts on Tuesday, he of course doesn't show up. When I call him at 1:30am on TUESDAY I hear a partially awake person saying "WTF mate?" on the other end. He naturally thought that he started Tuesday night, which would actually be Wednesday morning for people who know how a clock works.
*sigh*
Personally, I think "morning" is used stupidly in the English language. I mean, why is it supposed to describe the entire period between midnight and noon, considering how the beginning and end of this period is as different as... Well, as day and night? -And- overlapping with the word "night" at that? Silly, just plain silly.
In Norwegian, the word "morgen" (pretty sure you can see what that translates directly as) is described as the period shortly before dawn until a few hours afterwards. Then there is the word "formiddag", which would translate as "premidday", or "prenoon". That's right, there is a specific word for that period of time! We then have "ettermiddag" (afternoon), "kveld" (evening), and "natt" (night). And in this system, 01:00 (yeah, we use the 24-hour standard too, at least in writing) is the middle of the night, end of story. No overlap there. So much neater for everyone involved.
And as an added bonus, all of those sound like excellent times to go slay a sea wyrm. Does English sound as cool to any other native speakers as every other language sounds to me? I feel like I got a raw deal here.