Just between you and I, this time I’d like to take a look at hypercorrectness. And I’ll start with the previous sentence. Of course old English teachers everywhere will tell you that, because of the preposition, it should be, “Just between you and me.” And they would be right. Usually.
You see, the problem is that with our country’s ever-evolving rules of grammar, “Between you and I” is actually becoming accepted as correct (and if you’re a card-carrying word nerd like me, I feel your pain).
Progress aside, many people, including those who compile the Encarta Dictionary, still consider the “you and I” thing to be an example of hypercorrectness (also called hyperurbanism), or the correcting of something that’s not actually wrong. For example, you wouldn’t say, “Greetings from I,” so why would you say, “Greetings from Frank and I”? But many people DO say it, because they think “Frank and me” sounds wrong and they “correct” it.
Other examples of hypercorrectness are when someone says “shall” instead of “will,” or “lie” instead of “lay,” or use “which” when they should use “that.”
People commit these gaffes when they extend the patterns of supposed correctness beyond their established limits. What that means is they generalize that words like “me” are undesirable in certain uses even though they are appropriate.
As super-smart columnist Marilyn vos Savant put it, “Recently, the personal pronoun ‘me’ has acquired a diminutive or subordinate connotation (as in ‘little old me’). For that reason, people now use the word ‘I’ because it sounds better to them.”
Also annoying to word nerds — and probably everybody else — is the use of grandiloquence, a pompous or lofty manner of speaking or writing that suggests the speaker or writer is trying to impress people.
On my first day of school at the University of Maine, my Intro to Literacy professor, C.F. Terrell, passed out a mimeographed sheet of his proofreading marks titled “CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.” At the very top of the list of his proofreading marks, which I still have, is “V = Verbosity, prolixity, pariphrastic redundancy.” (On his list is also a pilcrow and a capital I that = “Insubordination.” Even though I wasn’t sure what it meant, I was just out of the Army so tried like the devil to avoid it.)
To make his point that we should use simple words whenever possible, Professor Terrell once recited Shakespeare’s “But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” If simple words were good enough for the Bard, then they should be good enough for the rest of us.
Mark Twain once advised an aspiring writer, “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.”
Of course it is still possible to be very annoying while using grammatically correct English. To make my point, we need look no further than “The Big Bang Theory’s” Sheldon Cooper, who tells Penny, “Look, you may not be as academically inclined as are we — yes, that’s how you say it . . .”
By the end of the episode all is well, and Penny tells Sheldon that she now feels closer to him, to which Sheldon replies, “And I you. And yes, that’s how you say that.” Sheldon was correct, but was he right?
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”
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