1050: Hypercorrections Oct 24, 2017

Prescriptive grammarians may preach rules for the way in which a language ought to be used, and though this can come from good intentions, on occasion it may lead people to make more mistakes, both prescriptively and descriptively. This is called 'hypercorrection', and it takes many forms. As discussed a few months ago with 'whom' but also with 'me', the fear of misusing a word, or form thereof, can cause people to avoid it and use other terms, such as in this case 'who' or 'I' where prescriptivists would say it does not belong such as in *"he gave it to my friend and I". This also happens too with pluralizations like 'campus' mistakenly pluralized as *'campi'. All of those would be considered wrong by prescriptivists, but other examples, such as *"I informed her of all the things up to which I was" rather than "...I was up to" which attempts to avoid a preposition at the end of a sentence without recognizing the intention of the phrase, would be ungrammatical to anyone. Indeed, "up with this I will not put".