Hypercorrection

Hypercorrection is the unnecessarily elaborate or prescriptive correction of common grammar, inappropriately introduced in an attempt to avoid vulgarity or informality. A hypercorrection is often a consequence of the speaker following supposed "rules of grammar" — such as avoiding split infinitives or the ending of a sentence with a preposition — even in cases where a grammatically "correct" phrase is clumsy. Hypercorrections can simply be incorrect uses of English grammar.

An anecdote often attributed to Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain during the Second World War, has Churchill replying to a hypercorrective memo with the phrase "this is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put". [1] This is an example of hypercorrection used as parody; although it is a grammatically correct phrase, the elaborate avoidance of a phrase ending in a preposition ("which I will not put up with.") is clumsy. As a further example of hypercorrection, Jack Lynch, assistant professor of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey, states that:

"We're taught as children, and beginning language learners are told, you don't say 'me and you went to the movies.' It should be 'you and I.' And a lot of people, therefore, internalize the rule that 'you and I' is somehow more proper, and they end up using it in places where they shouldn't — such as 'he gave it to you and I' when it should be 'he gave it to you and me'." [2]

Hypercorrection also occurs when a colloquial dialect differs in pronunciation from the standard. For example, since standard American English is a rhotic dialect (requiring the pronunciation of syllable-final -r), speakers of regional non-rhotic dialects often overcompensate for the loss of syllable-final -r by pronouncing some words ending in vowels as if there actually were an extra -r at the end (for example, pronouncing idea as "idear"). Similarly, individuals that generally pronounce ts as ds may, in an attempt to overformalize, pronounce lady as laty, for instance.

Another area of hypercorrection involves Greek and Latin looking words like octopus; the spurious plural octopi likens the octopus to Latin nouns of the Second Declension that form plurals in -i. (Were there actually a classical plural of octopus, it would be octopodes.) Platypus, cactus, status, hiatus, rebus, syllabus, mandamus, and caucus are sometimes inflected the same way; none would be inflected that way in Latin or Greek. Virus sometimes gets the even more inappropriate pseudoclassical plural form virii, which presumes Latin *virius, and would pluralise bus, a shortening of omnibus (for everybody), as bi. An even less sensible plural is penii (for the plural of penis, penes in Latin), which is not uncommon in Internet speak.

All of these words take the regular English inflection in -es, but a few of the hypercorrected forms, such as cacti, have passed into such common usage as to be considered acceptable by some, despite their origins.

When pronunciation of learned words goes astray, it is sometimes called a hyperforeignism. For example, someone might assume, upon learning that the -s is silent in Mardi Gras, that coup de grâce is pronounced "coo de grah". Another example is an English-speaker's pronouncing Beijing with a French 'j' [ʒ], even though the Mandarin Chinese sound represented by the 'j' in Pinyin is closer to the English 'j' [dʒ].

Another kind of hypercorrection arises when people try to use accents from foreign languages, often adding them spuriously. For example, one often sees *habañero peppers, which should be habanero, as a consequence of a misapplied analogy with jalapeño. This unintentional misuse of accents should not be confused with intentional misuse, or use without concern for traditional function, as in the heavy-metal umlaut, however.

Hypercorrection is very common when new speakers of a language are forced to 'gain' a phoneme which does not exist. For example, in most Hindi dialects, the phoneme 'w' is non-existant, causing the speaker to pronounce a word such as 'wish' as 'vish.' However, due to hypercorrection, a word with a 'v' phoneme, such as 'vegetable,' ends up being pronounced as 'wegetable.'

Hypercorrection in other languages

Modern Cantonese is currently undergoing a phonological shift, one of the changes being the dropping of the initial ng- (IPA: /ŋ/) consonant to a null initial. For instance, the word ngaa4 (牙, meaning "tooth"), ends up being pronounced aa4 (Note: Cantonese romanization provided using Jyutping). Prescriptivists tend to consider these changes as substandard and denounce them for being "lazy sounds" (懶音).

However, in a case of hypercorrection, some speakers have started pronouncing words that should have a null initial using an initial ng-, even though according to historical Chinese phonology, only words with Yang tones (which correspond to tones 4, 5, and 6 in Cantonese) had voiced initials (which includes ng-). Words with Yin tones (1, 2, and 3) historically should have unvoiced or null initials. Because of this hypercorrection, words such as the word oi3 (愛, meaning "love"), which has a Yin tone, are pronounced by speakers with an ng- initial, ngoi3.