#hypercorrection

[haleyhalcyon]

I have never hated English spelling as much as I do now

[writerystuff]

A plus: "condescend" is spelled correctly!

[mellifluousoctopus]

You know that phase young children have when they hypercorrect what they say? So for example an irregular verb or rule exceptions get butchered. “i goed to the store yesterday” “he wasn’t more good than me” etc

I don’t think I had that. Because I remember strongly getting mad at and correcting a girl in preschool over her grammar and at myc ousin for not understanding figures of speech when I was like 3 or 4.

Another girl had pushed her down and she exclaimed: “Him pushed me!”

I was like no: “SHE pushed you. Not Him. It would be He not him” It was big deal to me. Like a BIG deal. 

Which is rich considering I called lawnmowers “mowerlawns” and computers “putercoms” against my brain’s will

Its like I just understood English’s bullshit from day one and my mouth didnt get the memo

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus #5 - Hypercorrection | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Official Post from Lingthusiasm: Become a patron to get access to this post and other exclusive content.

Is it "you and me" or "you and I"? Does "octopus" pluralize as "octopuses", "octopi" or "octopodes? If you're ordering a nice bottle of champagne, how do you say Moët? And what does that say about you?

People care a lot about talking "correctly" -- sometimes so much that we over-apply things we've been corrected on even in contexts where they didn't originally apply, a phenomenon known as hypercorrection.

Hypercorrection and what we even think of as "correct" or "fancy" isn't just about the rules of grammar: it can also tell us a lot about the rules of society.  

To listen to Bonus #5, the first episode to use the brand-new fancy recorder, support Lingthusiasm on Patreon!

[writerystuff]

NEW SPORT

“...it's also the result of an arm's race between...”

Is arm racing like arm wrestling?

[onaa-ohokthen]

Funny example of hypercorrection in American English I just noticed: "layer" for "lair" (my other favourite is "jagwire" for jaguar).

[hyphenpress]

Interfinity mark

An interfinity question is a question that has both an infinite number of answers and no answer at all. Interfinity allows opposites to coexist. It can be said that the “an interfinity question is always more interesting than its response” and that the “response to an interfinity question is always more interesting that the question itself.”

In written conversation the interfinity mark* indicates that the question should be understood on a secondary level in which interrogative and infinite expressions are combined. The interfinity mark differs from the short-lived percontation point, invented in the late sixteenth century to indicate rhetorical questions, in that it denotes ever-lasting and ever-occurring questions: Is there life beyond planet Earth? Does god exist? Am I awake or am I dreaming? Is there life after death? What is the meaning of life? Was this article helpful to you? Where do you find your inspiration? What is your dream project? What are you unrealized projects? Are you happy? But why?

In a typographic sense the interfinity mark can be described as an interrogative punctuation mark formed by superimposing a vertical infinity mark (∞) with a question mark (?).

– Source: https://radimpesko.com/news/18

[camlangsci]

Macavity wasn't there

I was asked to write this post at fairly short notice, so as I was walking home earlier I was thinking vaguely about what I might include, not having prepared anything in advance. I was also listening to music piped from my phone via headphones, which happened to include the following lyric:

He’s outwardly respectable (I know he cheats at cards) And his footprints are not found in any files of Scotland Yard’s And when the larder’s looted or the jewel case is rifled Or when the milk is missing or another peke’s been stifled Or the greenhouse glass is broken and the trellis past repair There’s the wonder of the thing: Macavity’s not there!

These words are from the song Macavity from Cats, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s volume of poetry Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. What particularly caught my attention, however, was the pronunciation of the word jewel (in the third line of the above extract).

Historically (and to this day for some speakers), English accents distinguished a sound linguists write /ʤ/ from a sequence of sounds represented with /dj/. /ʤ/ is the ordinary English j sound, found in joke, jape, jollity etc. – sort of a d followed by the consonant in the middle of vision or at the end of beige. /dj/ is a sequence of d plus the y sound found at the start of year or yes.

Now, once upon a time it was usual to pronounce words like duel or duke with a /dj/ at the start: “dyuel”, “dyuke”. (This was simply a combination of d plus the “long u” sound, pronounced yu, which we find at the start of words like universe and university. Nowadays it’s especially associated with the British “Received Pronunciation” accent, or RP.) But a lot of speakers, particularly in the US, now just pronounce these same words with an ordinary d and no y: “dooel”, “dook”. And lots of other people pronounce them with /ʤ/: so duel is pronounced the same as jewel and duke is pronounced the same as juke.

What has this got to do with the song? Well, in the recording on my phone, the word jewel is pronounced /dj/. This is interesting because historically jewel never had the pronunciation /dj/, only /ʤ/ (as evidenced by the j in the spelling). But duel, as noted above, did used to be pronounced standardly with /dj/. So, in RP and accents like it, duel and jewel were pronounced differently.

This, then, looks like an instance of hypercorrection: a “correcting” of something according to a rule that doesn’t actually apply in this instance, thus actually resulting in an “incorrect” form. T.S. Eliot, though born in America, lived most of his life in England and many of the poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats are explicitly set in the UK: this, then, is also the setting for Cats. Further, the poems are very much early twentieth century in character, when traditional RP was much more widely spoken than today.

(This is, incidentally, important in another of the poems/songs, Skimbleshanks, which includes the line They’d be off at last for the northern part of the northern hemisphere. In my opinion, last and part are supposed to form a sort of half-rhyme, both with a long “ah” sound (found in last in RP but not many other dialects). In at least one US recording, however, last is pronounced with a short “a”, whereas part nevertheless has a long “ah” on account of the following r – and thus the similarity between the two words is lost.)

Anyway, back to Macavity. Whoever was singing this particular part about the rifled jewel box is clearly aware that duel, in RP, was pronounced with a /dj/. In their ordinary everyday speech, at a guess, they probably however pronounce it with a /ʤ/ (the same as jewel). They may then have a rule they use when putting on RP for the purposes of performance: “my ordinary /ʤ/ is pronounced /dj/ in RP”. Now, this rule correctly applies in duel. The singer in question, however, seems to have overapplied their rule to jewel and come out with a pronunciation that is strictly correct only for duel.

Is there a moral to the story? Really, this is just something I thought was interesting and worth remarking on. But if you want a lesson: sometimes, in trying to replace a “wrong” form with a “right” one, you may in fact end up doing the opposite, and getting it “wrong” where if you hadn’t done anything you’d have got it right.

Macavity wasn’t there was originally published on CamLangSci