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

But he never says the French are foolish or ignorant.

Apparently, people are still doing that google search stupidity to attempt to justify usage.

It therefore needs to be pointed out just how stupid that method is.

I think the extreme non-prescriptivists will have us all babbling eventually.

We are well on the way as it is.

This same drivel has been spouted for centuries, Spendi.

WTF are "extreme non-prescriptivists"?

Yes, I read your two posts before this one.

If you check out my posts you will find that I am a proponent of "appropriateness" and have pointed out the academic folly of a "correctness" concept.

The fact is however, that in "the real world" there is the ever persistent lay idea of "correctness" which informs market forces, and educators who do not drive that home to kids are failing in their duty to prepare them for such a world.

And at the end of the day, kids who have been left to wallow in the social forces of their peer groups and encouraged to assert their "individuality" often end up unemployable, and can even turn to antisocial behavior when they see jobs go to "educated" migrants who know what the score is.

Which makes one wonder why prescription is still with us.

But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the educational and writing establishments, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing:

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

To cut a long story short your use of "drivel" is an affront to the intelligence of untold generations and implies that JTT is superior to them all.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The 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. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

The scandal of the language mavens began in the 18th Century. The London dialect had become an important world language, and scholars began to criticize it as they would any institution, in part to question the authority of the aristocracy. Latin was considered the language of enlightenment and learning and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire. The period also saw unprecedented social mobility, and anyone who wanted to distinguish himself as cultivated had to master the best version of English. These trends created a demand for handbooks and style manuals, which were soon shaped by market forces: the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore. Most of the hobgoblins of contemporary prescriptive grammar (don't split infinitives, don't end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to these 18th Century fads.

Ibid.

People like you.

You're all wrong.
One Mini Cooper.
Two Minis Cooper.

This could easily be done by actually teaching them how language works instead of the ongoing nonsense that they still receive from way too many educational sources.