A few thoughts about math words

“Dad,” my son Zane said, “I just want to invite a few friends over.”

“How many is a few?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Some.” How many is “a few?” More than a couple but less than a lot? Some people will tell you that a couple is always two. Others argue that a couple is two or three, but for me, three is a throuple.

Zane is many things but is not into throuples. So I’m gonna put a few down as at least three but less than several. There are days that a few could be the same as some, but in my book, you progress from a couple to a few to some to several to many. Three-ish.

Still, it’s relative. To me, “a few” drinks is a sip of that second glass of Chardonnay. To Brother XX, “a few” drinks of wine is what you have until the box is empty.

Then there’s Julie Andrews. For her, in “My Favorite Things,” a few equals 14, starting with raindrops on roses and ending with wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings.

Zane’s “a few” seemed likely to be about seven, but who wants seven teenagers in my son’s bedroom on a Tuesday night, practicing their boxing?

By the way, if you modify “few” with “quite a,” you have to multiply by pi, as in, “I had quite a few Oreos before I went to bed.” “Quite a few” could be the entire package.

Now, when we’re talking more than one package of Oreos, we’re into the realm of much, many and a lot. “Many” is what you use for countable nouns, like, “The Fisher-Paulsons have had many dogs” (16). “Much” is what you use for non-countable nouns, like, “There wasn’t much wine left after Brother XX left.”

Still and all, I like numbers when they are numbers, not approximates. That goes back to high school.

Brother XX played basketball. Brother X ran track. My mother, Nurse Vivian, had several cousins who were monks or nuns, and all of them were smart enough to reject me from entering their high schools. So, she enrolled me in Archbishop Molloy High School. Think of Molloy as our Archbishop Riordan High with a New Yawk accent — and without the endowments or the attitude.

I was too slow for track, too short for basketball. So I earned my letter as captain of the math team. Mathletics is where the men are separated from the geeks. This was the heyday of the slide rule, just before Texas Instruments eliminated the need to memorize the times table. Hap and Nurse Vivian reluctantly watched my matches, even mumbled the cheer — “Secant, tangent, cosine, sine. Three point one four one five nine. Integrate! Integrate! Integrate!” — but it was clear they wished I had other interests, like baseball and girls.

Then in senior year, Brother Terence betrayed me. Advanced Placement Calculus. He told us about Eubulides of Miletus and the

Sorites Paradox, which states that if you have a heap of sand and you remove a single grain of sand, what you have left is still a heap. Take away another grain. Still a heap. And another. Still a heap. At some point you get down to one grain of sand, and you have to ask yourself, is it still a heap?

This, Brother Terence explained, is what differential calculus is about. What he did not know was that this was also the end of my math studies. I went to college and avoided every single numerical course that Notre Dame offered,

To me, “a few” drinks is a sip of that second glass of Chardonnay. To Brother XX, “a few” drinks of wine is what you have until the box is empty.

which translates to a liberal arts degree. And all because of a grain of sand.

My husband Brian majored in dance in college and also skipped the math classes, telling me, “After all, we didn’t have to count any higher than five-six-seveneight.”

And so, I no longer do math homework with my other son, Aidan. He knows I think calculators are cheating. He knows that left to my own devices I would calculate pi to the ninth digit: 3.141592653.

The result? Aidan still got a C in Algebra II last semester. It’s no better and no worse than when I tutored him. But as Nurse Vivian would say, the arguments were “few and far between.” Words matter. And so do numbers.

How many is “a few”? Too much. And sometimes not enough.

And Zane? Turns out his few buddies were busy that night, so just his girlfriend came over. Which was exactly enough for a couple.