Does anything strike you as odd about the title of this post?<\/p>\n
I came across this wording today in a book by an American author, and immediately thought, “don’t you mean ‘for the past few<\/strong> years’?”. For me that would be a more natural way to express this. Several<\/strong> in this context just sounds wrong. Maybe it sounds natural and normal to you.<\/p>\n Several<\/strong> is defined on WordReference.com as:<\/p>\n 1. being more than two but fewer than many (there’s nothing like precision, is there?<\/em>) Several comes from the Anglo-Norman several<\/em> (separate), from the Medieval Latin s\u0113par\u0101lis<\/em>, from the Latin s\u0113par\u0101re<\/em> (to separate).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Does anything strike you as odd about the title of this post? I came across this wording today in a book by an American author, and immediately thought, “don’t you mean ‘for the past few years’?”. For me that would be a more natural way to express this. Several in this context just sounds wrong. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,10,15,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-language","category-latin","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n2. separate; different
\n3. individual; respective
\n4. several persons or things; a few; some<\/p>\n