Yesterday, my wife and I stopped at the donut shop after church to get a dozen donuts. As we were choosing donuts, my wife told the guy that she wanted a couple of one kind to which he answered, “how many?” She says two. She picks another kind and says she’ll take a couple. He again asks, “how many?” Two. After we get out to the car, we relay this interaction to the kids and the teen girls defended him saying a couple doesn’t denote a specific number so he was right to question. My wife and I both said we’ve always known a couple to mean two and that it’s pretty well defined. The teens rebel and tell us why we are wrong. My wife pulls out the dictionary, multiples actually, to define the word couple which supports our knowledge of a couple as being two. The teens say a couple in the legal sense means two, but in any other sense is undefined and can mean anything. We go back and forth.. my wife gets upset. The teens get upset. I ask when did this change and got a response from the teens about how language changes over time. Yes, girl, I know that. I’ve been on this planet a lot longer than you have. But still every definition we could find of the word couple always came back to two.

I’m curious what everyone thinks the word couple means in terms of a number. What do you think?