hypercorrect

comparative more hypercorrect · superlative most hypercorrect · alternative hyper-correct

1. human sciencesNonstandard because of a mistaken idea of standard usage.

present singular third person hypercorrects · participle present hypercorrecting · participle past hypercorrected · past hypercorrected · alternative hyper-correct

1. transitivehuman sciencesTo change (a word or phrase) to a nonstandard form, or to another option among a set of accepted alternative-form options, in the mistaken belief that the form used was wrong.

   I use reduplicate to mean "redouble," though both words should mean "quadruple," but English is funny that way, so hold off on the hypercorrecting "gotcha!"

   2007 October 28, William Safire, “And Now This”, in The New York Times Magazine, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2022

2. raretransitiveTo correct excessively.

   3 more examples

   Likewise, both the chapcha that accompanies the modern Hebrew handshake and the explicit demand to shake hands like a "male" stem from the need to overcompensate (or hypercorrect) for the effeminacy, passivity, feebleness, and bodily unfitness so often ascribed to Jews by other Europeans (especially by Germans) in the nineteenth century.

   2012, Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, Paul Lerner, editors, Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History, Bloomington, I.N.; Indianapolis, I.N.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, page 163

   But their different life stages also provide the writers with much-needed fuel for conflict. It would be tempting to hypercorrect for the negative media representation of bisexuals by making Darryl infallible, but it's more helpful for the show to simply treat him as human. And that's exactly what McKenna and crew have been so careful to do.

   2016 March 7, Samantha Allen, “'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' Is Smashing Stereotypes of Male Bisexuality, One '80s Jam at a Time”, in The Daily Beast, archived from the original on 04 Jul 2022

   Let everything stand as it was tweeted or posted. We're not fooling anyone by pretending that people don't make typos, that they always know how to spell things correctly, or that they care about standard capitalization rules, and a reader will always be able to find the original tweet (if not least because it's been linked or embedded in the post in which it was quoted), and efforts to hypercorrect can appear silly or stodgy.

   2017, Emmy J. Favilla, A World Without "Whom": The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, London […]: Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 191