I define “hypercorrection as “incorrectly correcting what’s already correct, wrongly thinking it to be wrong.” The example that is usually quoted when defining the word is “between you and I,” which should be “between you and me.” Apologists for this misuse give several reasons: they say that “you and I” is a compound pronoun in the objective (accusative) case; they say that great writers have often used the form in this way; they say that many people do it now, so it must be OK. All very sophistical. Another example, a medical hypercorrection, is when an e is turned into an ae or an oe , in the belief that the e is an Americanism, just as “anemia” and “estrogen” are American forms of “anaemia” and “oestrogen.” This happens when people write, for example, “pancytopaenia” or “pancytopoenia” instead of the correct form, “pancytopenia.” What they don’t know is that the suffix –penia comes from a Greek word, πενία, meaning poverty. To add in an a or an o before the e , assuming that you are ridding the world of a supposedly vile Americanism, is an aegroegious error.
Hypercorrection is ..., well, it’s not often that the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) isn’t helpful, but this is one such occasion.
First, although it includes “hypercorrection” as a headword, it doesn’t define it; instead it gives four almost incomprehensible quotations and says “See hypercorrect adj .” Secondly, the definition of “hypercorrect” that it offers is obscure and unhelpful: “Of a spelling, pronunciation, or construction: falsely modelled on an apparently analogous prestigeful form.”1
So what does “prestigeful” mean when referring to a word? Well, the OED doesn’t define that either, and the one quotation it offers, from the journal Language in Society in 1990, is of little help: “In various studies ... …