I remember being distinctly befuddled when I was younger watching an episode of Fawlty Towers when the obnoxious “American” orders “a couple of filet mignons”.
As an American myself, it felt like one should know how precisely how many filet mignons one wanted when ordering in a restaurant, rather than leaving it up to interpretation.
Didn’t realize then that “couple” in British English was almost certain to mean exactly two. I wonder if Americans also used it in that sense back in the 1970s when that episode was filmed, or if that is actually a bit of a shibboleth goof — the “American” actor was of course British, like everyone on the show except John Cleese’s real-life wife Connie Booth.
(Now that I think of it, as Booth was a co-writer, she probably would have caught this mistake if it was in fact a difference in American vs. British English. I imagine instead the American meaning has drifted toward less specificity over time.)
I'm an American who uses "couple" to mean exactly two. I suspect this is more of a regional or familial thing than something we can say about American English as a whole.
I think there are enough commonalities to say useful things about American English. We all spell it "color" instead of "colour" to take a widely known example.
As an American myself, it felt like one should know how precisely how many filet mignons one wanted when ordering in a restaurant, rather than leaving it up to interpretation.
Didn’t realize then that “couple” in British English was almost certain to mean exactly two. I wonder if Americans also used it in that sense back in the 1970s when that episode was filmed, or if that is actually a bit of a shibboleth goof — the “American” actor was of course British, like everyone on the show except John Cleese’s real-life wife Connie Booth.
(Now that I think of it, as Booth was a co-writer, she probably would have caught this mistake if it was in fact a difference in American vs. British English. I imagine instead the American meaning has drifted toward less specificity over time.)