| 词组 | couple |
| 释义 | couple I 1. Agreement. Couple is a singular noun but it often takes a plural verb. Several commentators recommend the plural verb when the sentence also has a pronoun referring to couple since the pronoun will almost always be they, their, or them. • The couple remain friends and share custody of their four children —People, 10 May 1982 The governing principle here is notional agreement; if the writer is thinking of two people, the verb is plural: • The couple were married on April 21 —Current Biography, March 1966 • Our young couple from Catonsville were driving by —Alexander Woollcott, Long,Long Ago, 1943 • ... the couple have featured in sixteen plays — Times Literary Supp., 8 Feb. 1974 • Before long the young couple have vanished —Patricia T. O'Conner, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 16 Feb. 1986 When the writer thinks of the couple as a unit, the verb is singular: • The couple has three children —Current Biography, February 1967 • The couple has an apartment in Dallas —N.Y. Times, 1 Dec. 1970 • The couple dislikes fussy food —Francesca Stanfill, N.Y. Times Mag., 21 Dec. 1980 You will note that the verb seems naturally to be plural when the writing concerns a wedding, as two people are wed, and singular when it concerns children, as joint action is often involved. Consequently when children are mentioned and a pronoun reference follows, editors are likely to be upset: • The couple has four children of their own —NY. Times, 24 Mar. 1966 (in Winners & Sinners, 31 Mar. 1966) But they, their, and them are the standard pronouns of reference for couple, especially when people are referred to, regardless of the number of the verb. (See they, their, them.) In the example just quoted, his or her are impossible and its would sound silly. The substitution of the plural verb might tend to suggest that the couple had children by previous marriages. Although they, their, and them have been used to refer to nouns and pronouns that take singular verbs for centuries, many newspaper editors seem not to realize it. If a sentence like the one above makes your editor see red, you'll have some complicated rewriting to do. In other instances you could simply use the plural verb: • A Dayton couple was slain in their home today — N.Y. Times, 30 July 1961 (in Winners & Sinners, 17 Aug. 1961) In this example, the plural verb would work fine. 2. A couple of. The use of couple meaning "two" came under attack in the 19th century. Richard Grant White 1870 seems to have been in the vanguard (Hall 1917 gives 1867 as the first publication of the objection). The basis for the objection seems to be the etymological fallacy—couple is derived from Latin copula "bond." White's objection is raised with varying degrees of vehemence in several other American usage books—among them Bache 1869, Ayres 1881, and William Cullen Bryant's Index Expurgatorius (1877)—until sometime after the turn of the century. Vizetelly 1906 is typical: couple: Does not mean merely two, but two united, as it were by links. This usage had been around since the 14th century. Webster 1909, for instance, illustrated it with quotations from Sir Philip Sidney, the King James Bible, Addison, Dickens, and Carlyle. It is not surprising then, that White's objection rather fizzled out early in this century. Here are some other examples of the use: • A couple of senseless rascals —George Villiers, The Rehearsal, 1672 • We finished a couple of bottles of port —James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791 • Edward & Fly went out yesterday very early in a couple of Shooting Jackets and came home like a couple of Bad Shots, for they killed nothing at all —Jane Austen, letter, 15 Sept. 1796 • The tribe lost a couple of their best hunters —Rudyard Kipling, The Second Jungle Book, 1895 • ... during a couple of years that I spent abroad — Henry James, The Ivory Tower, 1917 The objection shifted from White's etymological one to the more general charge of colloquialism or to an objection to the use of the phrase in the sense of "a small but indefinite number." Vizetelly 1906 seems to be the earliest to object to the indefinite use; many later commentators follow. Bierce 1909 takes the opposite point of view, stating that couple should only be used when the idea of number is unimportant. The tendency of couple to be indefinite is shown in these examples: • For a couple of years the company succeeded in keeping clear of further disaster —E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 1923 • ... a cotton mill run by a hard-bitten North country working man who had borrowed a couple of hundred pounds to start the business —G. M. Tre-velyan, A Shortened History of England, 1942 • It apparently made relatively slow progress at the start, but after a couple of years it was in wide and indeed almost general use —H. L. Mencken, The American Language, Supplement 1, 1945 • A couple of times I gave up —E. B. White, letter, 2 Jan. 1957 Some handbooks still stigmatize a couple of as colloquial or informal, but we think you need not worry too much about the propriety of a phrase that has been in use for 500 years. To those who might urge that it is to be questioned only when it means "a few," we point out that the works of E. K. Chambers, G. M. Trevelyan, and H. L. Mencken cited above are not noted for their breezy style. For a more recent concern of the commentators, see couple, II While the commentators were worrying whether the noun couple could be used to mean simply "two" and whether it could mean "a few" (see couple, • ... all my experience indicates he is all right, means to do business, looked into his financial record which is fine—that sentence seems to be a little balled up, Miss McGoun; make a couple sentences out of it if you have to —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922 Lewis was not the only one to use it: • ... where the land rises to a couple or three or four feet—W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 1924 • ... in the phrases a couple peaches, a couple of peaches, only two should be meant —Krapp 1927 G. P. Krapp is the first commentator to mention the construction, but he evidently saw nothing wrong with it. A decade later, however, it was thought to be wrong: • couple. Not an adj.; must be followed by "of and preceded by article —Muriel B. Carr & John W. Clark, AnABC of Idiom and Diction, 1937 Of all the subsequent commentators who have disapproved the omission of of, Evans 1957 has the most interesting observation. While insisting that standard English requires of between couple and a following noun, he points out that the of'is omitted before a degree word such as more or less. And indeed this construction is found in standard English: • ... to emphasize his sincerity he swore a couple more oaths —C. S. Forester, Hornblower and the Atropos, 1953 • We can end this chapter by looking at a couple more examples of Middle English writing —Charles Barber, The Flux of Language, 1965 • ... middle-aged men expecting a couple more promotions —Peter Preston, Punch, 28 Nov. 1973 These examples are all British; the construction is explicitly recognized by a recent British dictionary, Longman 1984. The construction occurs in American English too: • ... till they had taken a couple more first-class lickings —Elmer Davis, But We Were Born Free, 1954 But American English usage seems to have been influenced by the number of commentators stressing the necessity of of. The result is the occasional "a couple of more": • ... a couple of more wins from Jim Palmer —Jim Kaplan, Sports Illustrated, 10 Apr. 1978 Nickles 1974 refers to this construction as a "garble" and opines that it results from confusion of a couple of with some such construction as a few more; he fails to recognize the standard a couple more. Theodore Bernstein seems to have encountered the construction, too; in a June 1967 Winners & Sinners he quotes Evans with a measure of approval, but questions whether all degree words fit the pattern. He comes a cropper by confusing Evans's "degree words" with ordinary adjectives. Of course he is right that a couple of 'is used before an adjective and noun: • ... to develop a couple of new techniques —J. S. Anderson, General Electric Investor, Summer 1971 • ... philosophical criticism by a couple of other professors —Robert Penn Warren, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 20 May 1984 Bernstein was unable to find any specific comment in usage books on "a couple of more" and concludes therefore that it is not wrong, though "ungraceful." If you find it ungraceful also and do not care to omit the of before more, you can put the more after the noun instead; the example above would become "a couple of wins more from Jim Palmer." Bernstein also notes that when more is promoted to pronoun by omission of the following noun, of'is not used, as in "... I think I'll have a couple more." But we have strayed from the red-blooded, 100-per-cent-American adjective before a plural noun that Sinclair Lewis heard in the speech of the middle-class Middle West. The usage is apparently not found in British English, although we do have one example from Jamaica. Here are a few American ones: • He got off the bus a couple blocks up and sauntered down past the alleyway —James Jones, From Here to Eternity, 1951 • ... plumped up a chintz-covered cushion with a couple slaps of his hand —Maritta Wolff, Back of Town, 1952 • The first couple chapters are pretty good —E. B. White, letter, 26 Oct. 1959 • ... I haven't heard their last couple albums —Leonard Feather, Down Beat, 25 Nov. 1971 • So let's start with a couple samples —Quinn 1980 • Afterward, I met Mark Mullaney upstairs for a couple beers —Ahmad Rashad, Sports Illustrated, 25 Oct. 1982 • ... though Mr. Shaw himself still operated a couple wagons for hire —Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, 1985 This construction seems well established in American English. Everyone who comments knows it to be common in speech. It is now quite common in general prose, but we have seldom found it in prose that aspires to formality and elegance. Its two most frequent uses are with periods of time and with number words like dozen, hundred, and thousand. • ... about the eighth century A.D., although Vaillant (1941) would make it a couple centuries sooner — Raymond W. Murray, Man's Unknown Ancestors, 1943 • ... have surfaced dramatically in the last couple weeks —James P. Gannon, Wall Street Jour., 16 Oct. 1970 • ... waiting a couple years before he'd be ready to compete —Kurt Markus, Western Horseman, May 1980 • There must have been a couple million people in the heart of London yesterday —an American businessman quoted by Bob Considine, Springfield (Mass.) Union, 9 June 1953 • A couple thousand cases of liquor —Wall Street Jour., 14 July 1969 • ... contains a couple hundred poems —William Cole, Saturday Rev., 18 Sept. 1976 • ... one of the couple dozen or so really hip people —Dean Latimer, East Village Other, 30 Mar. 1971 To recapitulate: a couple without of seems to have begun being used like a few and a dozen in the 1920s. Our earliest evidence is from that careful listener to American speech, Sinclair Lewis. It is interesting to note that another careful listener, Ring Lardner, had his busher say a couple of only a few years earlier: • I could of beat them easy with any kind of support. I walked a couple of guys in the forth and Chase drops a throw —Ring Lardner, You Know Me Al, 1916 A couple without of is firmly established in American speech and in general writing (though not the more elevated varieties) when it is used directly before a plural noun or a number word. Before more, a couple is used without of'in both British and American English and in this context is often preferred even by American commentators. |
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