More correct than you: How hypercorrections impress no-one.

I once heard a great quote that went ‘a high brow is just someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence.’ There’s a lot of truth in there. The great institution of grammar tends to be a haven for people who know a lot about language, but not much about anything else, such as not being jerks.

This is where the scourge of ‘hypercorrections’ hits us. A hypercorrection is where a non-standard grammatical rule is applied in the belief that it is correct, even though a more familiar, standard rule would work just fine. Put simply, it’s masturbation with words.

One of the most common hypercorrections is the Me and I rule. Most people are taught at school that you don’t say ‘Me and you should eat our lunches now’, you say, you and I should eat our lunches now. That’s fine, but I don’t know about you, but as a kid at school, MC Grammar had it drummed into his head that using the word me was as bad as stripping naked and doing a poo on the Queen of Sweden, due to the idea that it could be uncouthly misused where the more refined I should have been.

As a result, a lot of people tend to think that using I is more proper than using me. This is where you get sentences like 'He gave it to you and I'. This is incorrect. The rule is that the pronoun (You, we, she, he, them) that would stand in isolation is the one that you should use. For example, you would say I went to the movies, therefore you would say You and I went to the movies. However, you would say he gave it to me, not he gave it to I, therefore you would say he gave it to you and me, not he gave it to you and I.

The best way to remember this rule is to simply remind yourself that the pronoun that would stand in isolation is the one to use. For example, when you hear someone say The letter was for you and I, you know that they should have said The letter was for you and me, because you can't say The letter was for I (Unless you are a seventeenth-century fictional pirate, obviously)

This cool video which talks about the correct pronounciation of often, might be just what you need to help you along as you let your thoughts about hypercorrection sink in. Enjoy!