hypercorrection

A pronunciation, word form, or grammatical construction produced by mistaken analogy with standard usage out of a desire to be correct.

See also:

• Grammatical Error
• Inverse Spelling
• Linguistic Insecurity
• Reflexive Pronouns
• Standard English
• Who and Whom
• Whoever and Whomever

Examples and Observations:

• "My friend, you are yesterday. Whomever pulled off this caper is tomorrow."
  (Robert Vaughn as Ross Webster in Superman III, 1983)



• "Perhaps the most common example of hypercorrectness is the use of I for me in a compound subject: between you and I. Other common hypercorrect forms include whom for who, as for like (She, as any other normal person, wanted to be well thought of), the ending -ly where it doesn't belong (Slice thinly), some verb forms (lie for lay, shall for will), and many pronunciations."
  (W. R. Ebbit and D. R. Ebbitt, Writer's Guide. Scott, 1978)



• "The phrase between you and I looks like a hypercorrection (and is confidently described as such by some) starting with latter-day harping by school teachers on such supposed errors as It is me. But between you and I is far too ancient and persistent to be any such thing."
  (A. Sihler, Language History: An Introduction. John Benjamins, 2000)



• "[T]he attempt to foist 'proper' Greek and Latin plurals has bred pseudo-erudite horrors such as axia (more than one axiom), peni, rhinoceri, and [octopi]. It should be . . . octopuses. The -us in octopus is not the Latin noun ending that switches to -i in the plural, but the Greek pous (foot)."
  (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules. Basic, 1999)



• "Who is to give [schoolchildren] warning signals about the whole Grammar of Anxiety, which springs from the chronic fear of being thought uneducated or banal and coins such things as 'more importantly,' 'he invited Mary and I,' 'when I was first introduced,' and 'the end result'?"
  (Alistair Cooke, The Patient Has the Floor. Alfred A. Knopf, 1886)



• "Hypercorrection results from an effort to 'improve' one's speech on the basis of too little information. For example, having been told that it is incorrect to 'drop your g's' as in talkin' and somethin', the earnest but ill-informed self-improver has been known to 'correct' chicken to chicking and Virgin Islands to Virging Islands."
  (T. Pyles and J. Alego, The Origins and Development of the English Language. Harcourt, 1982)