Words to Your Mother: Hypercorrection

Hypercorrection is something that is familiar to you and I , even if you haven't heard of it before.  A hypercorrection is a phrase that is formed by taking existing grammatical rules and misapplying them in an attempt to be more correct but resulting in an improper statement.

Some examples of hypercorrection:

Pluralizing "virus" as "virii".  (The proper pluralization is viruses.)

Forcibly removing prepositions from the ends of clauses.

Using "you and I" as an object since it sounds more "proper".  ("He gave it to you and I.")

Hyperforeignism: Misapplying pronunciation rules for other languages to words that do not follow these rules.  (Lots of good examples of this at Wikipedia.)

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