A Few: Here’s where things tend to get confusing. I’ve asked different people how many they thought the words “a few” referred to. Their answers varied. Some insisted “a few” meant three and only three. Some said it meant three or four. Or maybe more. The answer is that there is no hard-and-fast answer. What “a few” means to me might be different than what “a few” means to you. So, if you tell someone you’ll be there “in a few minutes,” the two of you might understand that to mean, say, less than five minutes, but one of you might mean something slightly longer. And someone who wants to borrow “a few dollars” from you may really only want three or four bucks. But maybe not.