Talk:Hypercorrection/Archive 1

message: Is British English "defence" a hypercorrection?  The Latin roots DEFENDERE -> DEFENSA suggest that "defense" is the correct spelling - did "defence" arise by analogy with other words ending -ence?
:I wouldn't think so.  There is a whole host of words in British English that are spelled with -ence where American English has -ense.  For it to be a hypercorrection rather than a variant, it would probably have to make an audible difference, which it doesn't. -- IHCOYC 13:59, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Defense/defence

message: "Whom shall I say is calling?", while a grammatical error, need not be the result of a hypercorrection.  It could be a misanalysis of who(m) as the the object of say rather than the subject of is (the actual object of say being the entire clause who is calling).  I have replaced this with a less ambiguous, though less common, example: "Whom might you be?" Joestynes 09:53, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Example changed

message: Just came across this article, which I enjoyed.  The beginning of it seems a bit POV to me, though; my guess would be that a lot of hypercorrection is due to (partly failed) attempts to use dialects regarded as "classier" than the one natural to the speaker, rather than over-reaction to teachers' prescriptions.  The same kind of thing happens the other way around, when we pedantic and overly-educated types try to talk in a dialect (like "teen-age" or "Ebonics") that we don't really know.  (We no doubt sound to fluent speakers like idiots.)  For instance, if I were to try to speak like a young urban black American, I'd probably hypercorrect and mess up some linguistic rule about when to leave out "to be" in declarative sentences, and when not to.  It's just part of trying to use a language or dialect you're not natively-fluent in — accidents happen.  Frjwoolley 00:04, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I object to the inference that "ebonics" is a dialect when in fact it could more properly be labeled a barbarism. --Nonstopdrivel 08:38, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Prescription or imitation?

message: The article suggests the plural of "cactus" is "cactuses", but the spelling "cacti" is very widespread and I haven't heard a satisfactory refutation to it yet. So why wouldn't it be cacti? (Yes, "cactus" ultimately comes from Greek, but it does appear in New Latin.) - furrykef (Talk at me) 08:08, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The OED  says it's "cacti". — Chameleon 09:38, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hm, OK.  So what is the plural then?  Don't say "cactuses".  That's an anglicisation which I could work out by myself ;)  What is the original plural?  — Chameleon 15:38, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: In my profound ignorance, I guess the plural of kaktos is ... kaktodes?  But that falls under the general proscription, in English, of words that sound too foreign.  So we say "cactuses" and "viruses" (instead of "virides"), and are happy.  False pluralization is the basis of lots of little whimsies — "bi" for "buses", "Kleenices" for "Kleenexes", and so on.  (I've sometimes amused myself, and probably nobody else, when writing Latin by pretending various words were Latin, when they aren't, and declining them as Latin — e.g., velcro, -nis, fem. velcro.)  Then, not all Latin words in -us form a plural with -i.  Corpus -> corpora, domus -> domūs, and lots of others.  Frjwoolley 17:33, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have always assumed it is κακτος - κακτοι, which would latinize as cactus - cacti.--Curtis Clark 00:37, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

text: Actually you probably wouldn't be the only one amused. I've been trying to come up with a good saying interpreting the word "doofus" as Latin, but I need to come up with one where declension is appropriate. :) Hm... "Cave dūfum"? - furrykef (Talk at me) 23:50, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: The OED  says it's "cacti". — Chameleon 09:38, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plural of cactus 

message: It doesn't just occur in spoken (English) language - it occurs in programming languages too.  A classic is using == for assignment in C-derived languages: after having to correct
if (i = 0)  to
if (i == 0) 
enough times, you find yourself doing silly things like
 i == 0;
Which many compilers don't even warn about!--Wizofaus 03:22, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hypercorrection in other fields 

message: The v/w swap (Anglophone perspective) phenomenon is, I believe, not hypercorrection, as proven by the correct German or Russian pronunciation of "vodka" (to Anglophones it sounds like "wodka", even though when they say "wine" it sounds like "vine").  I am very interested in this phenomenon, but have only done my own thinking about it - if anybody knows of a name for it or knows anything else about it, please let me know.  I'm also considering putting together a map of all the people who "can't say dubya", as it appears to have as much to do with current language families as with being within a certain area - Germany to Turkey to India to Siberia to Iceland.  So, if you're interested, hit me up at my talk page, and if you're of the opinion that this is indeed hypercorrection, let me know pretty soon, so I don't delete that information (or insert hedge "arguably").
Adam Mathias 05:50, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've deleted it now. Unfortunately since there was no other example in the section, I had to take the whole section. Adam Mathias 23:16, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: In English as a foreign language

message: The question is:
*Hypercorrection is ... usage that many informed users of a language consider incorrect but that the speaker or writer uses through misunderstanding of prescriptive rules, often combined with a desire not to come across as informal or uneducated.
OR (Adammathias's edit):
*Hypercorrection is ... usage that many informed users of a language consider incorrect but that the speaker or writer uses through misunderstanding of prescriptive rules, often combined with a desire to come across as formal or educated.
Sundar (Talk) (rv, removing the double negative here doesn't give the same meaning)
:I wasn't necessarily trying to give the same meaning.  Given that, what do you think? Adam Mathias 07:27, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If so, it would be fine. But, which of the above meanings is closer to the definition? In hindsight, the former version seems to suggest that people who "hypercorrect" are "informal and uneducated", which is not correct. Feel free to revert my edit. -- Sundar \talk \contribs 08:13, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Double negative

message: I'm not sure whether we need another example of personal pronoun hypercorrection, but one of the early catchphrases of Barry Humphries' drag character Edna Everage (while she was still billed as a lowly housewife, not a Dame) was "Excuse I". This was supposed to reflect her desire to appear more sophisticated. --Heron 11:09, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Excuse I 

message: Hi 60.226.24.68 - rather than getting into a revert war with you, perhaps we can agree to add a {citation needed} tag. You've asked me not to change it without a source - perhaps you could provide a source for your addition? I've never heard of nor seen the correction you mention, especially since the Australian accent is non-rhotic and rarely pronounces the trailing R. Biggus 00:30, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that it needs a source, but I think the unpronounced final R would make hypercorrection in these cases more plausible, since people, when writing, would hypercorrect for R's they believe exist but are simply not pronounced. Adam Mathias 23:52, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, good point. I think it can be argued both ways - so I heeded the adage about discretion being the better part of valour. Biggus 00:30, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I find this a little confusing. It says that Australians say "foe par". However the Australian accent is non-rhotic and the final 'r' is not pronounced, it merely lengthens the preceding vowel. Because of this, an Australian voicing the written word "par" would pronounce it similar to "paa", and isn't that the proper pronunciation? Overall in Aust speech 'bar', 'car', 'spa', 'bra' all rhyme and have the same vowell sound. I have never heard an Australian put a voiced or emphasised 'r' sound at the end of faux pas. Australians can quite easily handle "Mardi Gras" - there's even a major Sydney event that uses that name - and we don't stick 'r' sounds at the end of that either. Moreover we can also handle the fact that "bra" and "spa" are spelled without an 'r' at the end without the compulsion to write one in. Writing "faux par" is simply a spelling error due to unfamiliarity with the French language. Asa01 03:16, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you may actually find that the vowel in bar is pronounced longer than the one in spa, but the point holds anyway. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:58, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Faux pas" misspelled as "faux par" 

message: Hi. I'm the one who originally added usually unmentioned detail to the description of Churchill's "up with which I will not put" quote—specifically, the fact that the "preposition" he was moving was actually an adverb. On 24 December 2005, Rspeer removed my "ramble that convey[ed] basically nothing". This is how it looked before Rspeer's removal:
:An anecdote often attributed to Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 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".  This is an example of hypercorrection used as parody. But Churchill actually went beyond creating a grammatically correct sentence to exemplify the pedantry of elaborate refusal to end a clause in a preposition (or insistence on placing the preposition before the relative pronoun)—"which I will not put up with"—, in that he treated "up" as a preposition, along with "with", when, in fact, "up" in this sentence is an adverb, modifying "put", so that the truly grammatically correct example of the avoidance would be "this is the type of arrant pedantry with which I will not put up"; but the actual quote is seen by some as even greater parody because the effort to avoid one "error" results in the creation of a construction (the unusual placement of the adverb "up") even more likely to be considered erroneous. Additionally, some grammarians consider "with" yet another adverb, rather than a preposition, in the verb phrase "put up with", meaning to tolerate, because this usage of the verb put is always transitive and loses its meaning if it does not have both "up" and "with".
Besides pointing out that "basically nothing" was actually a good deal of additional information, I have two questions to put to the participants in this Talk:
*What is a good, or the best, place in Wikipedia at which to include this information? For most of my life, I've heard Churchill's quote given as an example of something funny and, more specifically, as an example of the 'silliness' of the rule against ending a clause with a preposition: but I have never seen it pointed out that the word he moved wasn't a preposition—which some might consider at least an interesting, if not also an important, point. I thought Wikipedia would be a good forum in which to highlight this. Since Rspeer's edit, I've considered other options for keeping the information somewhere in Wikipedia: but consideration of making a separate little article for it, for example, led me to the seemingly logical conclusion that, when someone nominated the little article for deletion, someone else would recommend adding the information to this article, the "Hypercorrection" article—from which someone has already removed it once.
*Perhaps we should clarify whether, in "put up with", with is an adverb (whose absence changes the meaning of the verb) or a preposition (whose absence doesn't change the meaning of the verb). What are your opinions on the role of with? Settling this question could make a new version of the above quoted paragraph shorter.
Thanks for anyone's constructive, courteous input. President Lethe 00:49, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Churchill's famous quote 

message: The article says this:
:Similarly many, perhaps most, English speakers pronounce "machismo" as "makizmo" on the analogy of other foreign-derived words such as "masochism", though in Spanish "ch" is pronounced in the same way as in English.
I posit that the ch-as-[k] pronunciation is likelier to come from pronunciation of Italian words:
*1. Italian ch is often sounded [k].
*2. Don't some/many English words that end in ism have Italian equivalents ending in ismo?
*3. If we were people careful with our German chs, the word masochism might have an [x] (or a [ç]) sound, rather than a [k] sound.
Thoughts?
President Lethe 21:54, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Machismo 

message: I don't think this is a very good example, as there never was a /z/ pronunciation of this word in English.  The pronunciation in Ancient Greek is irrelevant (the two rival theories are "dz" and "zd"): the point is that, in general, derivatives of Greek words including zeta are pronounced with a /z/ in English but schizophrenia is an exception because so many of the early psychologists were German speakers.  For the same reason, many people pronounce "trauma" as "trowma", though the usual rule is that a Greek or Latin "au" is rendered "aw" in English derivatives.  (Similarly "libido".) None of these is a hyperforeignism, as they do not involve exaggerating the "foreignness" beyond the actual foreign pronunciation; though I do find "trowmatic" awkward. --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) 09:12, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. I hid it, and now I'll delete it. President Lethe 20:16, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Schizophrenia

message: The text said:
:Unlike some languages, such as French and German,
I changed this to:
:Unlike some other languages, such as French,
The reason is that German is not regulated. I am a native speaker of German living in Austria, and I can tell you for certain that a) there is no analogue for the Académie Française, and b) if such an institution were founded, it would be razed to the ground by angry masses amidst a horrid bloodbath within, like, three hours. Standard German is a pluricentric language.
Some people act as if the Duden dictionary were authoritative. But it isn't. It's just a dictionary made by a private corporation, like any other; it just has some tradition – in Germany anyway.
David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 00:03 CEST | 2006/6/8
:Hi, David.
:I'm an American who has contact with multiple native speakers of German, in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and who lived in Germany and may end up living in Austria.
:If I remember right, I, many months ago, wrote the sentence that you changed.
:The thing is this. Take the Rechtschreibreform, for example. When the governments of different countries come together and make a formal, international, governmental agreement on how to spell words, it may well be looked upon as an authoritative body's prescription. Perhaps the "single supreme authoritative body" wording is imperfect.
:It's true that not every German-using speaker, writer, publisher, &c., complies with these dictates. But the mere fact that the dictates even exist says something. The fact that not everyone agrees with, or follows, a rule doesn't mean that a body hasn't made the rule.
:I am not absolutely sure that any example languages need to be included in the sentence that you have changed.
:But I am curious to know your opinion about how we might make the part about German more accurate if we were to keep the German bit in the sentence. This isn't sarcasm or rhetoric; I really am curious to know what ideas you might have for recasting the sentence. ... Of course, a recasting that more precisely and accurately speaks about German may end up being a poor sentence about English (and English is the point of the section in question). ...
:I think the distinction I was trying to draw is this: If you're in Canada, or the U.S., or Australia or the U.K. or New Zealand or South Africa, or many other places where English is the first language of a sizable part of the population, and you and someone else are arguing about English usage, you can consult a dictionary, or any number of usage guides, or the style manuals of various publishers, or perhaps a set of guidelines for a government department; but, outside the confines of "How does this publisher do it?" or "How does this linguist recommend it be handled?" or "What does this dictionary say?" or "What's the usage for this government office?", you can't get a definitive answer that somehow reigns supreme over others in any kind of legal way. (I know the word legal is touchy; I don't at all mean to imply that an 'unorthodox' spelling in Austria would be considered a crime.) But (as I understand it (and I could be wrong)), in three major German-speaking countries, you could settle your argument, at least on the matter of spelling, by saying "Look: the Austrian, German, and Swiss governments have agreed that you must have three, not two, fs in Schifffahrt." I wanted to make the distinction so that persons from other countries, reading this article, might get a better understanding of why the section on English hypercorrection doesn't go around saying "x is absolutely right" and "y is absolutely wrong"—because, in English, it really is up to so very many bodies and you really could never get an absolute, universal answer.
:Your point that German doesn't really have an equivalent to l'Académe Française is worthwhile.
:Anyway, I'm just curious to know what you and anyone else thinks about the purpose of the sentence, how to achieve it, and what 'other languages' (if any) should be mentioned as examples.
:Sorry I got babbly.
:President Lethe 01:30, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  German is not regulated! 

message: Penii is given as an example of a hypercorrection.  It's a word I and others my age use, when trying to be funny.  We're not hypercorrecting, we're mocking.  It's like the Colbert Report.  I've never seen it used in a hypercorrected context.  moink 00:34, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Penii 

message: I thought I'd introduce two new points at the Talk page before adding them to the article, in case others want to express views on them.
• Very often, I hear persons whose jobs involve public speaking say things like "The problem is is that we need more resources." I judge this usually a hypercorrection (or at least some kind of error) based on the necessary repetition of is in "What the problem is is that we need more resources." It's clearly not just stuttering repetition; and I strongly doubt that they're consciously starting off with "What the problem is [* * *]" and then consciously deciding to eliminate what but keep the second is.
• I sometimes hear things like "She is definitely the smarter of my colleagues" (from a person with more than two colleagues). As far as I can tell, this has an origin similar to that of "a picture of Alex and I": the speaker heard proscription against using the superlative in things like "put your best foot forward" (when there were only two feet) and so got the idea that comparatives were somehow to be preferred over superlatives.
Any thoughts?
President Lethe 19:30, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  'is is that'; 'better of the >2' 

message: :"Up" is actually part of the phrasal verb to put up, and its placement before put is extremely unusual. The correct way to phrase the sentence would be, "This is the sort of English with which I will not put up."
Not sure this is right.  The actual phrasal verb Churchill was using was put up with, which means something different from put up.  "Put up with" has the specific meaning "to endure or tolerate"; "put up" generally means "to store," and that isn't what Churchill was saying.  The proposed recasting of the sentence doesn't fix it, and the only possible idiomatic phrasing is ". . . that I will not put up with."  Smerdis of Tlön 16:02, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, Smerdis of Tlön. This is also being discussed in an earlier section on this Talk page, called "Churchill's famous quote". You are, of course, right. Just before finding your note, I reverted User:Chris Weimer's edit; my edit summary says "the ver[b] 'put up' is quite different from the verb 'put up with'. if, WITH my friend, i PUT UP some shelves, it's not at all the same as when i PUT UP WITH my friend." — President Lethe 20:36, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The discussion in the section above isn't really a discussion. It's just where I posted about the matter several months ago, when my original version had been removed. After that post, I put in my shorter version, which you see in the article. But that section is where Chris Weimer posted today. — President Lethe 20:40, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can't put up with this