A certain category of language seems intended not so much to communicate, to carry ideas from a speaker to a listener, as to identify the speaker as belonging to a particular group, a coterie.  I’m not thinking here of specialized terminology, e.g. medical terms meant to dazzle the layman, of which my favorite is “idiopathic,” which means “we don’t know what causes it.”  Rather, I’m thinking of ordinary language used in a special way, as among some American blacks and in the jazz world “bad” means “good,” a usage the OED traces back to the mid-nineteenth century.  To look puzzled when someone says “It’s the baddest album out there” (one of the OED’s examples) would reveal your lack of hipness.

The more snobbish and tradition-bound the activity, the more esoteric its usages.  Take fox-hunting, about which I have a riddle for you.  An American is visiting an English country house where he sees the local hunt gather in all their noisy and red-coated splendor.  “Listen to that barking!,” he says, and then, counting, “why, there must be thirty-nine dogs here!”  What three linguistic errors does the American make?

First, it’s “hounds,” not “dogs.”  Second, they don’t “bark”; they “cry” or they “give tongue.”  And third, it’s not “thirty-nine” but “nineteen and a half couple.”  It’s the last term which really seems designed to separate the cognoscenti from everybody else. “Couple” goes back through Old French forms to the Latin noun copula and ultimately a Latin verb meaning “to fasten together.”  Copula is a fancy grammatical term for the “to be” verb which fastens subject and predicate together, and of course it’s at the heart of several words about sexual fastening together. In As You Like It Touchstone talks cheerfully about joining the “country copulatives.” As for why hounds are counted in couple, that presumably has to do with a related meaning of the word, namely a leash for holding two hounds together.  The OED traces this term back to 1400 or so, just slightly before people started using “couple” as a unit for counting canines.  Toward the end of the fifteenth-century Sir Thomas Malory wrote in the Morte d’Arthur about “A noyse as hit hadde ben a thyrtty couple of houndes.”  I do not know why for six hundred years the plural of “couple,” like the plural of the related term “brace,” as in “six brace of grouse,” has been without an “s.”  Perhaps it is simply another device for allowing a coterie to distinguish themselves from Americans and other unenlightened types.