"OF"

This is certainly not a life or death issue, but I am curious about the proper use of 'of' under some circumstances.

Is it "I have a couple marbles" or "I have a couple of marbles"?

"I will be home in a couple hours" or "I will be home in a couple of hours"?

I know better than to end a sentence with it, but this question has been troubling me for quite some time. It sounds correct to my mental ear in either example, so I am uncertain.

Zada,
of that I cannot answer. I'll defer this to the grammar experts.

I kind of like a "couple OF hours." It seems to flow better, but grammatically correct I am not sure of.

Carol

Hi Zada,

"Couple of" can be replaced with "few": in a few days time, in a couple of days time. More explanation here:

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Awhile and a while is a problem for lots of writers. Awhile means "for a while" so "for awhile" is incorrect; the for is already included.

examples:

I thought awhile before I answered.
I thought for a while before I answered.

Shelagh, I was always told that a 'couple ' was two, and a 'few' was three or more, as was several. According to that link, a man and a woman could be a couple even if there were two women and one man. (as in 'they were a couple' when using couple as a noun.)

Thank you everyone for responding.

Marie, That is exactly what I was thinking! And I agree with you Carol, it does sound better to my ear too.

Technically, you need the "of" to explain what "marbles" is doing in the sentence. Prepositions are good things - things sentences need the presence of. They are just not good for ending sentences with.

Ann

Sentences ending in a preposition. What's the world coming to?

There are many things I find in modern writing that I was taught was wrong. I also agree that the sentence needs the "of" there to complete it. Not only that, but it reads better. When I have to choose, I will always read the sentence aloud and go with the one that sounds best.

I hate to see people write things like; "I use to love the movies." When it should be "I used to love the movies." I can't stand to read or hear the word fun used as in "It was so fun." I think what they mean is "It was so much fun" and without the much it doesn't read right or sound right. Also I see signs all the time that say "For sale, old fashion apple pies." Of course, it is "old fashioned" with an "ed" on the end of the word.

I see these uses and many others in the writing of people that I think should know better, as they are best selling authors, but then, that gets back to that other thread we have been posting on, where people should spend some time learning the language if they are going to write.

Ann, I don't think they teach these things anymore, do they?

Hi Don,

The way language arts are being taught has changed drastically since we were students. The long pages of sentences with verb forms or usage choices in parentheses, where you crossed out the wrong form are long gone, as are the pages of verb conjugations, etc. There were some studies done that indicated they did nothing to improve ones ability to actually use the correct forms in speaking or writing. If you learned the correct forms at home, and read a lot, you knew them. At least that's what the studies showed. Students generally hated them, anyway, so teachers were eager to drop them. The trouble was, they didn't come up with an alternative that did work. The idea was that if students wrote a lot, they would write better. Teachers were encouraged to accept whatever was written. No more essays that looked like they needed immediate transfusions after the teacher marked them. The result was a lot of poorly written papers. (Duh!) Today the worksheets are back, but are tied into the literature being read. You read something, you study the sentences written by that particular professional author, learn to model them; spelling and vocabulary words are taken from the same selection. The process is reapplied with each selection. The idea is that more will be retained if it is placed in a context of an actual writing that has been accepted as having enough quality to be placed in a textbook. There is a question of motivation. It is not easy to convince students that using the correct verb tense is important enough for them to give time and attention to (see my preposition at the end of my sentence?)

My thinking is this. It was a mistake to focus, as was done years ago, on teaching the forms first, and often to the exclusion of writing one's own thoughts or ideas, and only writing essays until after the forms were learned. I can see it working better the other way around, encouraging writing by having the students just write first, and showing them proper forms later. I think using the literature selections as a springboard is a good idea. Wait until the last couple of years in high school to start explaining the rules, and put them in a context of "why" rather than "what." Not a noun is a person, place or thing, so much as the function of nouns is to put names to objects.
The argument against that approach is that bad habits are allowed to form, and would be harder to break. Personally, I've seen more students willing to change the way they write when they can see the sense in it than the other way around.

And here I go, giving you the whole bird again. You got me started on something I see as important. I will stop, at least for now.

Ann

For what it's worth, I always use the "of." It irritates me when I see it omitted. In speaking, it's actually hard to say, "couple marbles."

I believe the of should be included, too. I also think of a couple as two and several (or few) as three or more. I was watching Judge Judy the other day (well, maybe last year... times does fly by quickly) and Judy asked the plaintiff how many people were at the party where her laptop computer was damaged. She responded, "A couple." Judy pressed the issue and the plaintiff replied, "About twelve." "Twelve is not a couple," Judge Judy clarified. I had to laugh. No, twelve does not equal a couple in my eyes either.

Dear Ann,
I wish you could be my teacher right now! For all the time that I was trying to just learn to speak without the Oklahoma dialect of my youth and re-learning the words and how they would really be said....ie, creek vs crick, potato vs tater, nuf vs enough. and how the words were really spelled.

Sometimes I think about a day that was in a cotton field. The mud was cracked in a mirade of directions and peeling upward. I can see the mosaic of that mud, remember the cool dampness of it. I thought it was so peaceful and beautiful and clean. I was so young then. So hurt.

Words always hurt me then. I suppose that I got a bit callous.

You know, now words cannot hurt me. I know them for what they are. Just expressions of the mind. They are not the barbs that shot my heart years ago. I know you understand my heart.

Love,
Betty

Betty,

As a beginning teacher I was taught to never attempt to correct a student's speech patterns or dialect, that people would change those patterns themselves if they felt it ws a good thing. I always went by that. I would work with them when their written work contained choices that were not considered "standard English," but never their speech. Standard Engilsh isn't really "correct." It is an artificial standard, put in place by a few, and used as an excuse to look down on those whose words and patterns did not conform. I'm still struggling with Don Miguel Ruiz' Four Agreements. When I can manage to get beyond (actually it's closer to "get around.") what he says is the first step to wisdom, which is to never gossip, I read on to his second step, which is about never feeling hurt by the unkind things said or done by others, because it is never really about us, but is "a projection of their own reality, their own dream." As children, we believe everything the "big guys" tell us, especially the negative things they say we are. It's those hurting words we heard as children that are so hard to get over, even years later, because a part of us just keeps on believing they are true, even when our adult parts know they are not valid.

His statement of that First Agreement is actually, "Be impeccable with your word." In one sense, I guess I do that. I tend to say what I think, no matter what kind of trouble it's going to get me into. That's being impeccable, in a way, isn't it? The problem comes in when that word hurts somebody else, especially our children. That's why we need the Second Agreement, "Never take anything personally," because we are not really the problem. The problem is about their hurt, and their need to push it off on someone else - most often the ones who are the most innocent.

Ann

I see that you understand it all and express it with honesty. I wonder if you know how really lovely your are in mind and heart. Your spirit has always soared. Sometimes you have held the kite strings and longed to let them go. I love you, mind, heart and soul!

Love,
Betty

When I was first teaching English (as a second language), I was very careful when it came to coaching so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, but I think I was very lucky. These students wanted to be understood so badly...we spent a lot of time on becoming understandable and learning vocabulary associated with school, as well as being able to fit in to their new surroundings. Fun days! Lots of prepositions in interesting places, fascinating word order, and invention of new words!

Betty, your story about trying to lose your Oklahoma accent reminds me of when I first moved to CA from Louisiana. I was seventeen and went to work for the telephone company in Anaheim. After a training period, I became a jr long-distance operator. We had certain phrases we were supposed to use and our managers and chief operators could listen in at random and grade us on our performaces. I was terribly shy in those days and blushed like crazy at the slightest thing.

Well. Southerners always made several syllables out of the shortest words, and callers teased me all the time. I'd get flustered because I wasn't supposed to deviate from the phrases to answer personal questions, so I'd listen to how the other operators sounded when they answered a call. They said, "Operator," but they made it sound like, "Opra-ter" and I said, "Op-er-rate-tor." I practiced over and over to sound like everyone else so I wouldn't get teased.

Now, my acccent is only noticeable when I'm relaxed, or so I've been told, but now, of course, how I sound to other people isn't important. I'm sure any accent you still have is charming and a part of you. Words do have the power to hurt, but they also have the power to heal.

I hope your journey to a better life has been a joyous one. If Wooffer and all his critter friends is an indication, you've certainly brought joy to others. And that's what's important.

I never cared much for a Texas accent, and don't remember ever speaking with one. Neither of my parents had a very strong ones. My Mom's speech was closer to her dad's family, more soft southern than Texan, and my dad apparently lost much of his family's speech patterns while he was in college. As I got old enough, I worked at getting the last traces out of my speech. It helped that Orange had a major influx of northerners after the fifties, when the chemical plants opened along the bayous, just out of town. Most of my friends were from West Virginia and Maryland. I was embarrassed, not only by the accents, but the "backwards" culture. I didn't really start to take pride in being a Texan until I moved here to SA, where the culture is so rich in the state's multiple traditions.

There are so many different Texas accents, it is hard to speak of just one. There is a fascinating book about the influence of British folkways on American speech patterns called Albion's Seed that I have used as a reference for my book, Ailcy's Legacy. Much of it is related in this website on the Cumberland Gap area:

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The site focuses on the backcountry, one of the four folkways brought from the British Isles, according to Albion's Seed. The backcountry here was settled primarily by people from the Borderlands: Northern England, Northern Ireland, and Lowland Scotland. The other three include the Puritans, who came primarily from East Anglia; the Virginians, whose roots are in the south of England; and the Quaker migrations from the Midlands to the area around Delaware. From those colonial beginnings, these groups migrated across the country in specific patterns, taking their speech and cultures with them. As far as I've been able to trace so far, my mother's family is a mix of French Hugenot and the British Borders. There are DNA studies that place her Foster father's (that's Foster, her last name, not an adoptive parent) family with a group of Forresters from Northumberland, and her mother's with the Hugenot's. Her husband's family migrated from Georgia to Louisiana, which makes them part of the Southern-England-to-Virginia group. One of the major ways the groups are traced through their American migrations is speech patterns.

Brenda, what part of Louisiana are you from? Ailcy's husband was a Richardson from the area around Washington Parish.

Ann

I think accents are good. It sets one apart from the norm.
I love the British accent. Some of the great actors had that distinctive way of speaking. Someone once said that if you want to sound intelligent, speak with a British accent. Hmmmm.

My wife has an accent. Often my kids were asked about their mother's accent and they would reply, "What accent?"

Why try to be like everyone else? Who you are makes you special.

After spending 2 years in Alabama, I picked up an accent. I didn't even realize it until I was asked why I used y'all all the time! Then I could hear it in my own speech patterns. It took several years to get it out of my voice.

Do you suppose it's genetic? My people migrated from Delaware in the 1600's and 1700's down the coast to the southern states and then migrated west, winding up in Ca. in the 1900's. Maybe that is why I am so comfortable in the south.

Abe, I agree that today, speaking in a certain dialect is not the problem it once was. A generation or so ago, though, people were often judged by their dialects. That was particulaly true of the Scots-Irish derived East Texas dialect that was used by my deep East Texas relatives, which incidentally, was very close to a backcountry Kentucky dialect. It signified an "inferior" group, and made a big difference in the way one was perceived. My knowledge is limited in this area, but I haven't heard of a Pennsylvania dialect that branded one as "inferior" in any way.

Zada, to my earlier mentioned limited knowledge, I don't think it is genetic. The migration patterns were more a matter of seeking familiar, therefore comfortable, patterns of culture. The earliest Delaware settlers were frequently Quakers, and might have passed down those mores whether or not they maintained the religious practices. The coastal dialects in the south generally indicated a connection to higher levels of British culture. Lynn (my daughter) took an actor's course in Shakespeare where she was taught that our coastal southern accents were closer to Shakespeare's English than is modern upper-class British English (UK members, please correct me if this would be wrong). They did excercises using a modern dialect from southern coastal cities that you described, and found the meter worked perfectly. I have since used those excercises with my own students, and found the same situations.

Ann