by Kevin Burton
I can still hear Rosa, one of my English as a Second Language students trying out a new word, “seldom.”
I was a reasonably good teacher without having had any training. She was a very good student, having had better teachers in the earlier levels of English study.
“Seldom.” She was turning the word over and over the you one might a smooth rock.
“I seldom have a problem in my English class. I seldom go to the movies…”
It sounded good to her.
This came up in one of our chats outside of class. If you knew my song “Kisses and Keys” you would know what kind of chats we tended to have.
Ok, one, don’t judge me! Two, we are getting off the point.
The point is, some of these words describing numerical values are wicked mercurial. I am here to perform a public service, to help you navigate this imprecision. Be sure to save this as handy reference material. This is part one of a two-part post.
Maybe English is your first language, but numbers aren’t. Well you’ve come to the right untrained teacher. Pay attention as I run through some numerical phrases:
Two or Three:
You may think my first example is the easiest to decipher. It’s either two or it’s three, right?
Wrong. If I say I’ll be somewhere in “two or three” minutes, it indicates I am going and that I am going very soon. Yes, it could be in two or in three minutes, but it could be one minute, or four or five.
In some cases this phrase can be even more elusive. For example:
“According to court records, Mr. McGilicutty told the officer he had stopped for two or three drinks on the night he drove onto the airport runway.”
One more example: When I say I have done two or three fantasy football mock drafts to prepare for the real draft, you should be able to tell by context that what I mean is two or three mock drafts per night for the last six or seven weeks.
Here “six or seven,“ again, does not necessarily mean precisely six or seven.
You with me now?
Handful – Fistful
Some ham-handed linguists have mismanaged the terms handful and fistful. Unfortunately it is not within my power to fix this. All I can do is clear things up for you.
A website called difference bee, says that “Handful as a noun is as much as the hand will grasp or contain. – Fistful as a noun is the amount that can be held in a closed fist.”
Was that helpful? No.
So on to my go-to dictionary, Merriam-Webster.
Handful is described as “as much or as many as the hand will grasp” and then “A small quantity or number .”
Fistful is described by the same dictionary as a synonym to handful but also “a considerable number or amount.”
So to review, handful is a small quantity, fistful is a considerable number, but the two are synonyms.
You might think this a slap to the face of reason, or maybe a full-blown punch. And as you toggle mentally between those two thoughts, you begin to grasp the difference: attitude!
First, can an open hand truly contain anything? Don’t you have to have at least a partially-closed claw hand to truly grasp something?
What you are grasping with your fist, with teeth clenched in determination, you have in a death grip. A small-quantity handful becomes a considerable-amount fistful through attitude as much as through tightly curled fingers.
This makes sense in a way, but I need to point out here that the hand made into a fist remains the same size. So how much difference can there be, really?
Maybe the fistful people are trying too hard to hold something and either crush it or have it ooze through their fingers?
It could be helpful here to divorce the actual physical hand from this discussion, as in this example:
“Whereas I have a handful of smallish piles of important papers that could be better organized. My wife Jeannette has a fistful of heaping, heaving mounds of junk papers choking the life from our shared living space.”
Now I trust you’re starting to grasp the difference.
Seldom
My friend Rosa’s favorite new word means” rare or infrequent” according to Merriam-Webster.
Example: “Seldom have I encountered a contradiction as egregious as M-W’s handful-fistful synonym nonsense.”
I plan to post part two of this valuable word study in one or two days.
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