"There was two Mini Cooper parked in front of my house", or "there WERE two mini coopers"?

Considering that this has largely devolved into a dialogue between JTT and Spendius, I wonder how many members here are just seeing a blank page?

What's your preference?

So what's your point, Spendius?

Imagination under attack. It is difficult to say certain things prescriptively just as it is difficult to walk up a gentle slope pulling a steam-roller. Take the steam roller away and anybody can do it.

The [prescriptive] rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

Hence, descriptivism results in those things never being said or the reasons for preventing them being removed in order for them to be so. And that goes more than double for what is exhibited.

It is difficult to say certain things prescriptively just as it is difficult to walk up a gentle slope pulling a steam-roller.

Some of the certain things can't be said descriptively for various reasons.

So, for example, if a group condemns double negatives, and the descriptivist puritan runs up wagging her finger, she is herself being prescriptivist because she fails to acknowledge the large community of Enlgish speakers who condemn double negatives--she fails to describe them.

Giving Up on Double Negation

G Pullum

...

However, Orwell's hostility to the not unjustifiable construction I've just mentioned, pales into insignificance beside the hostility that well-educated speakers of English feel toward a completely different phenomenon also called double negation, and that's the kind of negation illustrated in Cockney, by 'I didn't see nuffink'.

This, educated people think, is mere ignorance. Anyone with a logical bone in their head should be able to see, they maintain, that if you did not see nothing, then that means you did see something. If you claim that you didn't see nothing when you mean that you did see nothing, you are ignorant and unworthy and should be sent back to whatever awful school was responsible for the teaching you clearly didn't get.

Well, this is a thoroughly misdiagnosed situation. Let me explain how a linguist looks at the phenomenon in question. There is in fact only one negation in 'I didn't see nuffink', as used by Cockneys or working-class Australians or black Americans or anyone else who uses this device. It's the negative of 'I saw somefink', and what differentiates Cockney from Standard English has been entirely misidentified by calling it double negation.

Here it is, somewhat over-simplified: Standard English has three separate versions of the item whose positive version is 'something'. I am referring to the words 'something', 'nothing', and 'anything'. The first of these, 'something', is used in positive contexts, as in 'I saw something'; the second, 'nothing', is used to create negative clauses, as in 'I saw nothing'; and the third is used nearly everywhere else: in negative clauses like 'I didn't see anything', in conditional clauses like 'If I saw anything', in questions, like 'Did you see anything?' and various other contexts. Cockney differs in one simple respect: the second and third versions are not distinguished. It's as if we had a language that was just like English but with 'anything' and 'nothing' pronounced the same. That's all that's going on.

The mistake is in seeing a mistake. This kind of usage is not a mistake. It's a form of words that is characteristic of many languages, including Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian and Cockney, but not Standard English. Linguists call it Negative Concord.

The Cambridge Grammar of English, I have decided, is not going to hush this up with a blush and a mumble and pass on as if embarrassed. It's going to greet it seriously. It's going to explain, of course, that Negative Concord is not used in formal writing and should be avoided in all contexts where keeping up appearances is an issue. But it is also going to explain how Negative Concord works, which is something like this: Everywhere you would get an 'any' word, like 'anything', 'anyone', 'anybody, 'anywhere', 'any', or the indefinite article 'a',

Negative Concord languages require that you use the appropriate 'no' word instead. It doesn't matter how many there are in the sentence, this applies to all of them. So if you take 'I don't want a linguist with a grammar book giving me any lectures about a proper way to speak to anybody', it comes out in Cockney or in a Negative Concord language, as 'I don't want no linguist with no grammar book giving me no lectures about no proper way to speak to nobody'. That's not a sextuple negation, it's an ordinary single negation. But there are five indefinite words like 'a' and 'anybody' in there, and they all get pronounced in Cockney the same as the negative words 'no' and 'nobody'.

You have to learn this if you're going to make any claim to knowing English. Because if you believe that when the Rolling Stones play 'Satisfaction' and Mick Jagger sings 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' he is singing about how it is impossible for him not to be satisfied, you can't even understand rock 'n' roll. A fully competent speaker of English knows how to work out the meaning of both 'I am unable to obtain any satisfaction' and 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction', and knows that the first of those would be suitable in a business letter and the second would be appropriate in personal conversation in a pub in Spitalfields or Pentonville. A person who cannot understand Mick Jagger's lyrics, even if they are written out on a sheet of paper (nobody can understand much of it when he's singing, of course, is not a better English speaker, but a worse one.

The way I see it, real class in being an English speaker involves understanding both the Queen saying, 'My husband and I cannot imagine anything nicer', and a Cockney speaker saying, 'Me old man and me can't fink of nuffink nicer'. Real class is being knowledgeable about the diversity of English as well as sensitive to the nuances of the different varieties. The status-obsessed grumblers who complain about other people's double negations do not have class. There is nothing classy about insensitivity to the complexity of the linguistic world around us. If you pay attention to linguistic diversity and appreciate the variety in your language, you'll find you can't get no satisfaction.

There is nothing classy about insensitivity to the complexity of the linguistic world around us. If you pay attention to linguistic diversity and appreciate the variety in your language, you'll find you can't get no satisfaction

Describe for me some rules that are prescriptive.

Please provide some examples and show how descriptivism prevents "[S]ome of the certain things [that] can't be said".

You must be joking.

Some of the certain things can't be said descriptively for various reasons.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

i know O'George loves this song.

As I pointed out, I meant "may not" by "can't".

That depends on what "can't" means. How do I provide examples of things that "may not" be said?

Describe for me some rules that are prescriptive.

You must be joking. How about the rule Hollywood operated up to the early 60s that a lady reclining on a bed had to have one foot on the carpet. Or that a Greek statue had to show one foot connected to the ground. Or the Balbec hotel bedroom scene with Albertine. Or the first page of Tristram Shandy. Explain the fuss about the tit at the Superbowl. Or Quatermain's last confession in King Solomon's Mines. Or Panurge's dilemma.

pre·scrip·tiv·ism (pr-skrpt-vzm) KEY

NOUN:
The support or promotion of prescriptive grammar.

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/prescriptivism