Hypercorrection Puns

In the past I would cringe when people would misuse "you and I." Now I just accept it might as well be correct since so many people make this hypercorrection.

For people who speak or grew up with languages besides English, what are examples of hypercorrection in, say, Chinese? French? Spanish? If there are more examples in English, I would also like to hear them.

I think anyone who browses the Internet may have seen countless jokes and remarks about people just replacing « who » with « whom » to sound more intellectual than they seem.

I first noticed it on 9gag (yes I'm a young adult haha) in 2013 if I'm not mistaken. Nowadays I still see people writing comments on YouTube with perfect English... but with the dreaded « whom » instead of « who » when it's the subjective case.

The same thing can be said for using « and I » as the object of the phrase, though it is less obviously pretentious.

Please help settle this dispute I had.The question is about whether something falls under hypercorrection or not.

Situation: A German speaker (who doesn't speak English, but knows the pronunciation of a few English words) tries to pronounce the unfamiliar word "steak". She is in en environment where she would very much like to seem like she does speak English. She knows that "ea" in English is often pronounced like the "ea" in "Mead" and therefore pronounces steak like "steek".

My father claims this is hypercorrection. I don't think it is, since for hypercorrection to apply, the speaker would have to pronounce the word correctly when in an environment where she isn't trying to impress and therefore trying to (over-)correct the way she speaks. Which wouldn't have been possible in this case because she has never heard how to correctly pronounce "steak" in the first place. This is just a case of someone applying the wrong rule for pronunciation, not over-applying a self-imposed rule for correcting their speech.

I honestly don't have the energy to make this post sound super academic so I'm just gonna ask my question. Th-stopping in Irish English. Is there any evidence that hypercorrection ever happens where people turn alveolar stops into interdental fricatives? I think I may have just heard it, but not sure if it's an observed thing.

I grew up in Minnesota with a Norwegian family, so crazy vowel shifting à la Fargo was happening all over the place. One of the most common vowel shifts in Minnesotan (and I suppose other Great Lakes accents) is /æ/ > /e/. This shift is extremely common before a /g/. So bag is pronounced "bayg," flag is pronounced "flayg," agriculture is pronounced "aygriculture," etc. Even at a young age, I realized that my Minnesotan accent was non-standard and not how the people on the TV spoke, so I set about trying to "undo" the Minnesotan sound shifts so that I could speak in a general American accent. Overall, I've been very successful in doing so. (Despite living on the East Coast now, I still refuse to pronounce caramel in three syllables out of principle.)

However, a few months ago my girlfriend (an L2 English-speaker) made fun of me for how I said "fragrance." I pronounced it /frægrənts/, and I had been for basically my whole life. Turns out, in the general American dialect the pronunciation is actually /fregrənts/. But because of the vowel's environment, I "undid" a sound that never actually occurred and created a new pronunciation that nobody uses. When I was younger, I pronounced "vague" as /væg/ and "bagel" as /bægəl/ for the same reason. (I managed to stamp out those mispronunciations in high school.)

Do you have any fun stories of hypercorrection, either in your L1 or in languages you've learned? For those who may not know, according to Wikipedia, a hypercorrection is a "non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of these rules that the form is more 'correct', standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated."

I had it drummed into me at university many years ago that linguistics is all about being descriptive not prescriptive, and for the most part this has informed my attitude to non-standard English usage since then. But I can't help being irritated by one particular solecism: the use of "I" as an object in coordinate structures, e.g. "the ambassador accompanied my wife and I to the coronation".

Can anyone cite any examples of similar hypercorrections that have made it into standard English or any other language? (As I'm sure this will eventually). I'm hoping this might help cure me of my irritation.

Something which I have noticed recently among my British friends is that, in conversation, they will often knowingly use words "incorrectly" in order to sound more acceptable (incorrectly in quotation marks because it is not for me to say what is correct or not). The best example I have of this is in the case of 'less and fewer', I have found that my friends would always rather say 'less', for example in the sentence 'I know less correct words than I should' in which, by the accepted rules of correct English grammar, 'less' should be replaced with 'fewer'. If corrected on this point they will say that they knew it should be 'fewer' but did not use it for fear of sounding pedantic. I was wondering if anyone else had come across this or something similar and why they think it may be happening. A fellow student with whom I was discussing this came up with the term 'inverse hypercorrection' to describe the phenomenon which I liked very much and so stole for my post title.

So I thought adding the initial "ng-" was hypercorrection. But the dictionaries I've seen aren't clear.

Are these just variants of each other or are they examples of lazy sounds (dropping the "ng-"), or hypercorrection (adding the "ng-").

Thanks.

I've noticed a tendency to use the participle "done" without "with" among several native English speakers I've met recently. All were upper class educated white women from the East Coast (specifically, Philadelphia and DC).

Examples:

> I'm done my dinner.

> I'm done my chores.

> If you're done your work for the day, you may go home.

Assuming the pattern isn't any of the things I mentioned in the title to this post, the only explanation I've been able to think of is contraction confusion. You can imagine people "mistaking" the the "he's" of "He's done his work" as "he is" and not "he has", and then generalizing the pattern to allow "You're done your work" even though "you're" != "you've".

A quick google turned up nothing but prescriptivist whining and balderdash, so I'd love to hear what this subreddit says.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_(pronoun) lists this as a hypercorrection (as it is a 'subject whom'):

"Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drown'd, [...] " (from The Tempest)

I guess the question boils down whether "whom" is the subject or object of "is drown'd", as "they suppose" is a subordinate clause... right?

There is a post on the front page of /r/askscience right now titled, "If the Big Bang was an explosion of space-time, and space is still expanding, is time expanding too?"

I am trying to decide whether or not it would be more properly worded if "was" were replaced with "were". I know that typically conditional statements are in the subjunctive mood because they are speaking counterfactually, and would thus be worded with "were". In this case, though, I'm wondering if that would be a hypercorrection, since the event in question probably occurred.

The second example that I'm curious about is this title from another post, "It would be so punny if the new xbox was called xbox 720, guess microsoft tried to avoid that joke."

To me, this one seems a much more clear-cut case of the subjunctive mood, but there was some debate in the comments and it got me thinking about hypercorrection.

Also, I'm having trouble understanding this example from this New York Times blog entry:

>He suggested that, if the City Council were unhappy, perhaps Apple could move. The company is Cupertino’s largest taxpayer, with more than $8 million in property taxes assessed by local officials last year.

>This one is a hypercorrection; we used the subjunctive when it was not wanted. Sequence-of-tense rules after the past “suggested” required the simple past tense: “if the City Council was unhappy” (see the last example in the stylebook entry above).

Specifically, why is this a hypercorrection? The article isn't very clear.

tl;dr: The bolded parts are three examples of sentences that I'm having trouble determining the mood of.

I have noticed a peculiar thing in the german accent on multiple occasions. The pronunciation of a “V” often turns into a “W”.

I had a German roommate that played “Wolleyball” although when speaking German she had no trouble saying Volleyball. Another example would be mispronouncing “awailable”.

What fascinated me, is the fact that a “w” sound isn’t really present in German (except in the form of a “ua” combination) but a “V” sound very much exists in the shape of German “W”.

So the question is how and why does this happen? And also are there any other examples of accents mispronouncing a sound that actually does exist in their own language.

Sorry for the lack of scientific notation.

"I don't know what time it is for you" sounds way better, seems like a case of hypercorrection where they are using the contraction of "it is" everywhere, even in places where it's not natural like the one I said above, I just *know* that the use of "it's" in this circumstance is wrong, but I don't know why.

Do your worst!

I am a fluent English speaker and its not a second language but I am trying to find as much knowledgeable takes on this matter as I can.

I was at work yesterday. At the end of our shift, my two co-workers, our manager and I (haha) were chatting away about some nonsense to pass the time. One of my co-workers rings her mother and asks, “will you come and collect co-worker x and I” and our manager jokes that he never knew her English was so bad. He claimed the only correct way to phrase this sentence was “will you come and collect Co-Worker X and me”. Basically, my manager and I were ranting to each other (in all good spirits) for the best part of about 35 minutes in the back office about whether the sentence should sound “X and I” or “X and me”. We put money on it. If there is an English teacher or someone studying English here who can verify which one is actually correct (in context of the sentence), it would be great. If applicable state in your answer if you are an English teacher or not. Thanks

“Will you come and collect X and I?”

“Will you come and collect X and me?”

It really does, I swear!

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

They’re on standbi

Pilot on me!!

Buenosdillas