Some of the Ways Writers Hypercorrect
Published by Deanna Hoak April 5th, 2006 in grammarMmmm. I’ve been copyediting a manuscript this morning that the editor has gone to the trouble to print out in nice large Courier New, and I’m munching on cookies the editor also sent. Talk about your ideal working conditions….:-)
But I have a grammar post that’s just pecking at my brain, wanting to get out and down on pixels.
It started percolating when we went to a nice restaurant the other day, and the waiter, trying to be fancy and correct, asked me, “Does your food taste well?†I of course smiled and assured him it was wonderful, but it got me to thinking about the whole issue of hypercorrection, because that’s what that type of grammatical error is called: He’d been taught that it was incorrect to use “good†in a sentence such as “Was your food prepared good?†and he then interpreted that rule to mean that “good†just shouldn’t be used in that position at all.
Hypercorrection is one of the most common mistakes I see good writers make—just not usually with the “goodâ€/“well†distinction. :-)
One common hypercorrection I do see, though, takes two different forms: both based on avoiding the words “and me†(or “me andâ€). It’s very natural, when we’re children, to use “me†in the subject position—“Me and Jimmy saw some aliensâ€â€”where it’s incorrect, and we’ve all been “taught out†of that at some point in our lives. Often, though, the lesson takes hold too hard, and writers tend to think that “and me†is not okay even when it’s in the object position, where it’s actually correct. Thus you end up with hypercorrections such as “Those aliens abducted Jimmy and I.â€
Writers who have gotten past that particular hypercorrection sometimes end up with a slightly higher-level hypercorrection of that same construction. They look at that sentence and say, “No, the ‘I’ isn’t correct there, but ‘me’ just doesn’t sound right. It must be ‘myself’: ‘Those aliens abducted Jimmy and myself.’â€
And, well…that isn’t right either. The correct sentence really is “The aliens abducted Jimmy and me.†“Myself†is a reflexive pronoun—it reflects back on the subject of the sentence. To be correct, then, the subject should be “I.†You can say “I almost peed on myself in fear†but not “But then the aliens fixed Jimmy and myself an octopus sandwich.†Sometimes, though less commonly, you’ll even see writers hypercorrect to use “myself†in the subject position: “Jimmy and myself spat those sandwiches right into the eyes of one purple-spotted alien and started running.â€
So the unnecessary avoidance of “and me†is one of the hypercorrections I see writers make. Another one—and it’s probably the most common grammatical error I see good writers make—is the use of subjunctive when the sense of the sentence doesn’t call for it. We were all taught, at some point, that subjunctive is used for statements contrary to fact: “If I were an alien, I’d have the sense to give people some decent food!†The problem arises, because of that, when writers assume that any statement introduced by “if†requires subjunctive, when in fact many statements don’t, because the “if†sometimes indicates a condition or a contingency instead of something contrary to fact. Thus, “We looked back to see if that purple-spotted alien were behind us†would be another hypercorrection; you should have “was†in that sentence, because there’s nothing contrary to fact going on (well, except for the aliens that showed up in chapter 12, but hey…;-)).
Now if such hypercorrections occur in dialogue, a good copyeditor will figure out a) what the author is doing intentionally and b) what the author doesn’t actually know. A copyeditor really shouldn’t go mucking about with grammar in dialogue very much at all, because you want dialogue to sound as natural as possible. However, I can usually tell by the end of my first read whether an author knows one of these particular rules or not by how consistent they are in hypercorrecting; if every character in a book speaks the same way—and if there isn’t a good reason for them all to speak the same way, such as an isolated village with no outsiders and little socioeconomic distinction—I may query the author about what’s actually desired. When Jimmy turns out to be the kid’s forty-year-old stepfather who has a Ph.D. in English, you may not want him saying “If the alien were following, we couldn’t tell, but the boy and myself found our way out and jumped back into the cornfield from whence they’d abducted he and I.†:-)
49 Responses to “Some of the Ways Writers Hypercorrect”
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I'm a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels I have copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 I was short-listed for a World Fantasy Award for my copyediting.
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Well done. I’ve noticed every one of those hypercorrections in the scholarly nonfiction I copyedit–although “whom” where it doesn’t belong is probably the most common in this field.
(Nice subtle addition of “from whence” there at the end!)
Do you know Dave Barry’s song “Proof Reading Woman”?
The chorus goes
‘I’m in love with a Proof-readin’ woman,
Gonna love her ’til the day I die
She’s got a big dictionary, real good grammar,
She never says, “Between you and I.”‘
It’s very funny.
You know, I remember seeing incorrect “whom” a lot when I did college textbooks, too, but I rarely come across it in fiction. That’s another good one for people to take note of, though.
LOL! I haven’t heard it. I like the sound of it, though. :-)
Thank you for speaking to something I had wondered about lately (the “were” thing). I’m saving this post.
I split infinitives. I end sentences with prepositions. My grammar grounding isn’t the best, which is a sad thing for a writer to admit.
Aliens get such a bad rap these days…
Sing it, sister!
This is one of those issues that makes me want to murder, or at least slap, television writers. (Don’t ask what I want to do to advertising writers; subject/object screw-ups are the least of their offenses against English. Why is the world so full of stupid people, and how do they get jobs doing something they suck at?)
Let’s not forget the other hypercorrect “I”–as the object of prepositions. AUGH!!!!
I automatically correct people who do this in front of me. Always. Doesn’t make me popular, but in the long run it might keep my ears from bleeding.
I wonder–do writers use “whom” in fiction much? It has fallen out of use in most people’s everyday conversation, it seems. So maybe when writers choose to use it in fiction, they double-check to make sure they have it right?
Splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions is perfectly fine in English.
E beat me to it, and she’s right. :-)
… are going to go ’round, if you keep ridiculing Jimmy and mine’s plot.
;-)
One of the amusing things about hypercorrectness for me is that when I say sentences correctly (like “The aliens abducted Jimmy and me”) people will often think I’m speaking ungrammatically. And attempt to correct me. I think the rule of thumb I learned in grade school was something like, If you drop the other person, how would you say the sentence? You wouldn’t say “The aliens abducted I,” but rather, “The aliens abducted me.” I don’t know how correct that is, but that’s how I tend to remember it, anyway. (Remember that bit in “Catcher in the Rye” where the teacher tells Holden he’ll have just enough education to fall into the moral trap of secretly hating people who say “Between you and I”?)
*sigh* I was actually trying to think of an inventive way to work in a sentence about the annoying kid getting eaten at the end, but I need to get back to work. :-)
LOL! :-D
I’ve heard enough back-and-forth for it to still bother me, even though the alternatives can sound might pompous. I’m glad to have it confirmed that both are acceptable.
My trickiest bit is ‘lie or lay’. I can memorize the entry in Elements of Style and still screw it up.
I think the rule of thumb I learned in grade school was something like, If you drop the other person, how would you say the sentence? You wouldn’t say “The aliens abducted I,” but rather, “The aliens abducted me.”
That’s the trick I learned as well. Still use it.
Thanks for explaining subjunctive! I’m sure I get that wrong at least occasionally (if not often), since I didn’t know (gasp) that the sticking point was whether something was “contrary to fact.” [bookmarking for future reference]
Now, if you one day write a post entitled “that v. which v. nothing at all” . . . I’ll send you zen cookies! ;-)
Here’s how I remember that. I say to myself, “If you’re in bed, you’re lying,” and in my head I’m making this little play on words to pretend that “lying” is “prevaricating,” because of um…getting horizontal with someone. (I know, I know…that’s just how I remember it.) :-)
So when I know which is which, I can remember that the past tense of “lay” is “laid,” because you can put on the “d” and have it “sound” right. You can’t do that with “lie” unless you’re still prevaricating. :-)
I have been running into ’shrunk’ lately.
Shrink, shrank, shrunk? I shrink today, I shrank yesterday, I have shrunk?
But instead of their saying ‘he shrank heads for a living’ they are saying ‘he shrunk heads’. I feel puzzled.
And every time I type them they look less like real words.
I remembered that YouSendIt thingamajig all the young kids like, and put the song there:
Dave Barry and the Wrockers - Proofreading Woman
You probably know this, but Dave and his friends made up a band, which was pretty good, really. Well, it was fun to listen to. (Norman Mailer is not that good a singer, but Molly Ivins and Maya Angelou are SUPER!)
There are several copies of the CD on Amazon, but the funny thing is, a bunch of sellers have it listed in the Books area. So THERE it is about $4, but over in the CDs, one guy has it priced for over $40! Oh, that wacky Amazon.com!
Here is the $4 link if you feel you need your own copy. (It’s not mine–I would never sell mine!)
I thought the rule was that one “lies on the bed” but you “lay down an object” — that “to lay” must be followed by a thing/noun/object of some sort. So in the cases where you’re the object (that self-referential thing again), it’s “I lay me down” just like one “lays down the stapler” but without the stapler, you’re lying. Ahem.
I learned most of the grammar rules I know from studying French and Mandarin. Really, learning a foreign language seems to be the best way to finally understand our own.
I think I’d be happy if folks writing copyad could just get the ITS and IT’S straight, and that just because a word is plural with an added s does NOT mean it automatically gets an apostrophe.
Concerning your job, though: how often do you run across grammatical mistakes in the narrative, see them duplicated in dialogue, and realize that’s supposed to be there? I have four or five voices in my current WiP, one of whom speaks in Southern English (”he weren’t gonna be there in time”) both in narrative and in dialogue — but when it’s time for the non-native speaker’s voice, the grammar is far more formal (”the indictment with which we’d approached the suspect”). Does your internal grammar-
junkieeditor tweak on such purposeful screwups, or does it make you grit your teeth?Any play that helps… ;-)
I think I’ll still need to remind myself, though, because some things just don’t seem to stick. There are also certain words that I’ve been misspelling for years because the correct spelling just won’t take.
It’s ridiculous.
Now I’m hungry for an octopus sandwich.
As the copy editor for a department, the one everything has to go through before it gets to the Big Boss(tm), I find that in e-mails to me people will twist themselves up in tight little balls of trying really hard to be gramatically correct. From time to time I will get something so uncomfortably phrased that I am really thrown off before I remember I’m the editor and they think they have to be perfect for me, as if I will red line their e-mail and send it back for revision.
Well, yeah, you can lay yourself, but it’s not nearly so fun. ;-)
I was going to post that!
You are so right. I taught foreign languages for seven years and when I’m in doubt about something in English, I go through grammar rules for Spanish or French.
Now, if we could just get people to stop saying, “I felt badly.”
Oh, you are inexpert at feeling, are you?
We were teaching that trick to our six year old just the other day. Hee!
Not to mention illegal in some states.
OMG, that’s amazing. :-) Thank you so much for the link!
Mmm…Yum. Damn finicky kids. ;-)
I don’t run into that much, since I’m a freelancer. Every once in a while, someone who doesn’t know how “descriptivist” I am will post something on my blog that sounds as though they’re worried I’ll correct them. :-) I don’t, though. I’m fine with dialogue, and the conversations here are just that.
Heh. Yeah. That goes along with my food having a good sense of taste. :-)
I can usually find a way to write myself out of a grammar situation that feels clumsy, but is actually correct.
The alien fired his laser rifle at Jimmy and me. That’s correct, but clumsy.
Well, Jimmy + me = us, so I could say: The alien fired his laser at us.
“Does the food taste good?”
Why not just “How does the food taste?”
Ooh, that last leads to a punctuation problem. Should I make that sentence:
Why not just “How does the food taste?”? No, I think not.
The fine points of grammar fascinate me.
–Steve J
Lovely post, Deanna. Thanks!
That’s where dictionaries come in handy. :-) Merriam-Webster’s Online has inflected forms. Past is shrank or shrunk; past participle is shrunk or shrunken; present participle is shrinking.
Link
I shrink today, I shrank or shrunk yesterday, I have shrunk or shrunken at some unspecified point in the past. I am shrinking RIGHT NOW!
- Benja
A more subtle one that’s a bugaboo of mine–and more than once I’ve seen copy editors “correct” this from right to wrong: “She said she was going to go home with whomever walked through the door next.” “Whoever” is correct here, but try explaining it…
It’s not quite that simple, unfortunately: the subjunctive can also be used for a condition that is just unlikely, not impossible. If I won the lottery, I could afford a new computer.
This, in fact, is what the English-as-a-foreign language rule about conditional sentences teaches, even though contrary-to-fact statements about present conditions certainly need the subjunctive, too. If memory serves, the rule goes like this:
1. If + present + will: A condition that isn’t particularly unlikely. If I get a job, I’ll be able to afford a new computer.
2. If + past + would (none of that subjunctive stuff, the students are in a sufficiently bad mood already): A condition that may still come true, but is unlikely. If I won the lottery, I’d be able to afford a new computer.
3. If + past perfect + would have: Something that is impossible because the condition is in the past. If I had not said “Jimmy and I” in the interview, I would have gotten the job and wouldn’t have to play the lottery.
- Benja
This might date me, but I was taught subjunctive by remembering the jingle “If I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner…” (i.e. something that could never be true).
But perhaps some people are confused because they’re thinking “If I were a rich man” … and imagining that it might be true if only they picked the right numbers in the lottery. ;-)
Yeah, that’s a good one. One of the nonfiction people said she sees it a lot, but I don’t come across it all that much in fiction. :-/
I have this wild speculation that lie and lay used to be the same verb, but that they split into a transitive form and an intransitive form. Is there a philologist in the house?
Yeah, I just find that the rules are easier to remember with a funny mnemonic device. :-)
Those can be invaluable. That’s how I remember the Great Lakes - HOMES!
A bit late, it occurs to me that you may have been talking about when to use “if I were” and when to use “if I was” :-)
On that, English-as-a-foreign-language descriptively and uselessly opines that “if I were” is always correct and “if I was” is always wrong. (Wasn’t that a nicely adjectivized said-bookism?)
I’ve said people claim that “if I was” should be used for possible situations and “if I were” for impossible ones, but I don’t really think that enough people are following that rule to make it the one and true one. IMHO, always using “if I was” or “if I were” is just as acceptable. But I don ‘t have any sources to quote on that theory. ;-)
- Benja
Just got sent this today, and it made me think of you:
http://www.partiallyclips.com/storage/dentist_lg.png
(and there’s a number of others, equally headdesk-worthy!)
Hm. Well, I’ve seen some awfully odd rules for teaching EFL (I arranged my master’s coursework so that I could have my degree in either linguistics or TEFL, depending on which I wrote my thesis in), and I far prefer to use standard style manuals for information on grammar rather than EFL textbooks.
The use of the subjunctive is certainly undergoing change, and perhaps the textbooks don’t pick up on that.
Here’s what my favorite style manual, Words into Type, has to say about subjunctive:
Heh. Too cute. :-)
Deanna:
You are an angel! Thank you for posting these helpful tips.
:-) Jody