From an article on the coronavirus in Italy:
there are only a couple cases in all of Tuscany.
As long as I live this will never sound right to me in print, though it is fast becoming default standard usage (William Safire famously cited Norma Loquendi as the ultimate authority on linguistic correctness—I imagine her as a statue like “Blind Justice”: her name means “the norms of speech”).
As a copy editor I am forever inserting “of” after “a couple,” which, alone, sounds like a sloppy colloquialism to me. It’s fine to say “See ya in a couple days” (though even there I would probably say “See ya in a coupla days”). It’s not fine to write it. (Besides, how many is “a couple”? Two? Then why not just say “two”? To me “a few” is three and “several” starts at four, but that’s another topic.)
I know this is just Round 1,254,997 in the endless cage match between Norma Loquendi and P. Dant. But people like me will have to die out before such barbarisms go amnesically unchallenged and slide frictionlessly into the canon.
The Compulsive Copyeditor 
