#couple of

[fieriframes]

[SAVE A COUPLE OF PIECES FOR AFTER I PUT THE GARLIC IN. SO SOMETHING CHASES IT OUT. RIGHT. PUT IT ONTO THE MIXER. AND THEN WE'LL SEASON IT. YOU GOT IT. FENNEL. LOT OF FENNEL.]

[blu3mila]

finished my latest sketchbook on the 31st of December! 3rd image is my dear @surnudring 

[greg-a]

They're very together.

[mybabywalkers-blog]

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[g-isabellae]

there are two people liveblogging breaking bad on my dash right now and from the comfortable distance of having never watched the show i'm finding their reactions adorable, but deep down i know they are much stronger people than i am because just from the descriptions i don't think i could sit through one episode let alone whatever roller-coaster ride this one is. 

[giovannisierra]

Dad taking away my whip really fucked me over. Now I have to wait for mother to pick my ass up I hate it....

[damenleeturks]

Emotional Linguistics

"Couple [as opposed to couple of] is not slang or colloquial or conversational English; it’s just plain wrong, and we should stop making excuses for using poor grammar."

You Have a Couple of Something, Not a Couple Something « Everything Language and Grammar

I've got no problem with telling people they're wrong (even if it's been a while), but the boldfaced arrogance of this article really irks me. 

Honestly, it's like telling a stranger that they're not raising their kids "correctly" or that the way they smile is "wrong" and that any excuse they might have for doing things the way they do is invalid.

English doesn't have the Real Academia Española. It doesn't have L'Académie française or it's arrogantly named immortels.1

English's varied style guides are really just amalgamations of arbitrary rules (Really APA? That's what I'm supposed to do?!). They end up being both supremely frustrating undergrads and quickly forgotten by anyone else. Such tedious rules end up driving people toward making Facebook groups to organize against them, Twitter accounts to mock them, or compilations of fake (but seriously useful) punctuation marks.  

As English speakers (especially in the US), we're linguistic rebels, scavengers, and inventors. We've got our quotable quippers, our witty wordsmiths, and even our not-well-thought-out marketing campaigns.

And because of these linguistic innovators, our very brains are changing and evolving. 

And this is what makes our language end up seeming like it was either "carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary" or "two morons just makin' stuff up."

Reading things like this reaffirm my stance as a descriptivist. Language evolves.

And you know what, I like it.

—

"Their moral authority in language rooted in customs, traditions, pomp" (L'Académie Française, via Google Translate). ↩