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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting, and daring of them to taste food having spent 10 months in the ocean! That must have been an epic "for science!" moment, for sure.

Semi-meta: as a non-native speaker, does the expression "a handful of apples" feel natural? Is that, like, 4-5 apples, or whatever you feel a handful corresponds to?

I mean, most people will struggle actually holding more than one or two apples in a single hand, but perhaps that part is so idiomatic that the literal meaning of the words don't matter? Would you say "a handful of aircraft carriers"?

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Yes, that's fine. English speakers regularly use "handful" to mean "about five".

As a random example I googled "handful of buildings" and got >700,000 hits, e.g. "Charnley-Persky House is one of a handful of buildings that display the combined talents of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright".

You can even have "a handful" of non-physical things: "a handful of ideas" gets almost 5 million hits on Google, e.g. "We started with a handful of ideas that sprung out of our collective experiences on social media."

To me (native English a la USA) apples are in a sort of uncanny valley between things that could in fact be measured by the physical handful, like peanuts, and things that couldn't -- buildings being way off the charts, obviously.

Context will make the difference. If you say "grab a handful of apples", no one will believe you meant to say it, because that doesn't make any sense.

"There are a handful of apples" is a different usage, which people will accept.

Well maybe. I've literally grabbed handfuls of wild apples, about the size of ping-pong balls.

(Maybe better described as feral apples? Old orchards with trees unpruned for decades.)

FYI: anyone eating wild apples should take care to avoid "beach apples" cause they're highly toxic.

https://www.google.com/search?q=beach+apple&source=lnms&tbm=...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchineel

Same. A single apple, as found in the grocery store, is about one handful. Once you start talking about things much bigger than what an average human hand can hold then "a handful" does work as a synonym for "a few things" - probably less than ten.

>..."a few things" - probably less than ten.

Now those are fighting words. "A few" is obviously 3-5, six in a dire emergency.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=A%20couple%2...

I feel like, when talking about things which you'd usually expect in large quantity, "a few" means "any less than makes a pile."

E.g. for grains of rice, even 23 or so of them could still constitute "a few grains stuck to the sides of the bowl."

Similarly, in databases, "a few rows" is any amount that's not Big Data ;)

While "a handful of testicles" means exactly two.

https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/327276064009240577?la...

Cool, thanks!

Never really thought about this, but I wonder whether "handful" also is roughly equivalent to "number you can count on one hand" (ie, around 4 or 5 if counting with fingers).

As an American English speaker, I have never come across context where a handful means about five. Handful has meant a relatively small amount, with the actual quantity always depending on the context of the item being discussed.

As a non-native English speaker, I’m curious about what the minimum and maximum values of handful would be (and what the items being referred to are)?

When the same term is used in my (western European) language, I would probably put the assumed range in 4-6, potentially 3-7.

I wouldn't think about it in terms of minimum and maximum values. I'd use "a handful" to emphasize ideas like this:

- The number of items being quantified is small

- You could make and understand a list that included them all

- I don't know the exact number offhand

But what counts as a "small number" varies depending on what you're talking about.

The parent says "about five" because you have to choose to say "a handful" over "a few" or "several" or "a dozen or so" or just "many." Five is the sweet spot where none of those other terms apply.

Agreed. A handful of M&Ms or Skittles is far more than five...

A handful means either the amount you can hold in your hand "add a handful of salt", or a small number so "Country X only has a handful of aircraft carriers" is fine.

I think with apples it would be the second meaning but it's a grey area. With something smaller like "a handful of cherries" I'd go with the amount that can be held.

Great observation! Indeed a "handful of blueberries" is a larger number of blueberries than the number of planets in "a handful of planets", or senate bills in "a handful of bills", and more than the handful of examples I've mentioned

I would never personally say a handful of apples because it is an object where the size might be in question and potentially a few small apples might fit in you hand. Conversely yes I’d say a handful of cars/buildings/ships to mean 4-6 ish.

More like putting out a platter of "Free Food!" for grad students.

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