The dictionary is just one report about use, and sometimes a pretty laggy one. What’s interesting in your story isn’t “who’s right,” it’s the collision of two temperaments toward language.

Here are the ideas that feel most alive to me:

1) “Few” as designed uncertainty, not sloppy certainty

Your childhood joy reads like a recognition that some words are tools for not-counting. They let you be honest about what you know and still communicate something actionable.

“Few” isn’t merely a number-word. It’s a way of saying:

• I have a rough sense of magnitude
• counting would be wasteful / beside the point
• the shape of the situation matters more than the exact tally

That’s not weakness; it’s epistemic humility with a backbone.

2) The “few = three” move is a social power move

Even if nobody intends it that way, “few means exactly three” functions like a credential:

• I know the real rule.
• You’re being vague because you don’t know.

So the argument isn’t really semantic; it’s status + authority disguised as semantics. And your suppressed anger makes sense because it wasn’t just about a word—it was about having your delight (and your mode of knowing) treated as illegitimate.

3) “Quite a few” isn’t a contradiction; it’s a clue about how meaning works

You noticed something profound: modifiers don’t only adjust quantity, they adjust stance.

“Quite a few” often means something like:

• “enough that you shouldn’t minimize it”
• “more than you’re implying”
• “more than one or two—don’t pretend otherwise”

So it’s not “few plus more.” It’s few being recruited into a different rhetorical job: correcting someone’s expectation.

4) Your real theme is the difference between “meaning” and “potential”

You weren’t asking “what does few mean?” You were asking “what can few do?”

That’s a very deep shift: words aren’t static labels; they’re moves in a game. Their “definition” is less important than their range of possible, socially recognized moves—how they can soften, sharpen, accuse, reassure, hedge, concede, tease, protect, invite.

5) The pain-point: precision as a moral virtue

In a lot of educated spaces (especially writing cultures and math-adjacent cultures), precision gets treated like virtue itself, and vagueness gets treated like vice: laziness, immaturity, even dishonesty.

But there’s another virtue: appropriate resolution.
Sometimes the moral failure is over-precision—forcing the world to pretend it’s cleaner than it is, just so the speaker can feel in control.

6) The quiet punchline: mathematicians live on “few” all the time

Not in the word, necessarily—but in the practice: “let ε be small,” “for sufficiently large n,” “in a neighborhood,” “generic,” “almost surely,” “up to a constant,” “in most cases.”

Math is full of disciplined vagueness—controlled flexibility—because it’s often the only way to move.

So your happiness around “few” wasn’t anti-mathematical. It was very mathematical: you were sensing the power of leaving room so thought can breathe.

If you keep developing this, I think your strongest claim isn’t “few doesn’t mean three.” It’s:

A culture that forbids words like “few” is a culture that forbids certain kinds of honesty—and certain kinds of joy.

That’s the heart of it.