Who doesn’t love puppies? I sure do, and here are a few reasons:
- Their cuteness
- Their playfulness
- Their puppy breath
I could go on and on talking about these bundles of joy, of course, but I only listed a few reasons. Not numerous, not some, not many.
A few.
Although there is no hard answer to how many “a few” is, it is generally slotted in right after “a couple” (two) to mean three. And even if you are not an absolutist – and consider few to be a small number of, or not many, things – in absolutely no definition will you find “few” to mean 18 things, which is the unofficial record we had once in a proposal.
Consider this sentence, which is not uncommon to find in some variation in any of our proposals: “We are proud to call the following institutions partners: Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, WeWork, IBM, Google, Staples Arena, Chase Stadium and San Jose State University, just to name a few.”
Sorry, but you didn’t just name a few partners. You named 10.
A Few Parting Words
This blog is short, but that’s on purpose. I wanted to spend a few moments explaining how “few” is misused and give a few examples on how to use it correctly. It’s not a complicated lesson, so just a few paragraphs did the trick.
But feel free to read it a few more times – even if we both know you’ll do it just to see the puppies again.
Don’t be sad. We’ll be back on the first Monday next month with a new blog post. If you can’t wait that long – whether because you have a topic you’d love us to cover, a question or you simply want to throw your two cents into the pot – we love talkin’ shop, so drop us a line.
