Is there such a phenomenon as "undercorrection/hypocorrection?

[Wilson Gray]

It makes sense to me. Thanks, arnold,

-Wilson

>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>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)