Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?

[Jonathan Lighter]

I was beginning to think I was the only one left who automatically eschews the unnecessary, illogical, and bedamned "of" in those constructions.

I'm sure it's ancient, but I only began to notice the "of" within the last 20 years or so. (Yeah, I know....)  Yet, to judge from CNN & Fox, this - like "is is" - is now the near-universal rule in speech, not the exception.

JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: Is there such a phenomenon as
"undercorrection/hypocorrection?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Mar 16, 2005, at 1:36 PM, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

> John Baugh has a nice piece on hypocorrection...

>> Spoken by a black TV-show guest:
>>
>> He aks me _whose, uh, who_ car was this.
>>
>> -Wilson [Gray]

but what wilson reported almost surely wasn't someone aiming for
something less standard than their usual variety. it sounds like
someone starting out in a nonstandard variety that's natural for them
(note the "aks"), shifting towards a more standard variety, and then
fixing things by shifting back to the first variety. the speaker isn't
aiming low (or high), but correcting to stay on course.

as it happens, i was about to post a somewhat similar example, from an
interviewee on NPR's Morning Edition, 3/8/05 (talking about mercury
vapor):

-----
...it will break up into so small a... so small of a bead that...
-----

people with "of" in this degree construction tend to judge the
"of"-less variant as fancy, bookish, old-fashioned, pretentious, etc.
so this guy found himself embarking on the stylistically inappropriate
construction, and fixed things.

i don't think we have a label for this sort of correction.
whimsically, it might be called "Mama Bear correction"
("ursacorrection" for short). "orthocorrection" (not high, not low,
but (just) right) is a less whimsical possibility, and it keeps up the
tradition of using greek-derived prefixes with the latin-derived base
"correct(ion)".

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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