Hypercorrection

“She was found safely.”

Adjectives, Adverbs, Hypercorrection, Verbs

I heard this four days ago on a CNN evening-news broadcast.

Problem:
There is no problem with this statement in and of itself. But the reporter was referring to the state of the person found, so there is a problem.

Explanation:
The CNN reporter said “She was found safely.” as part of a longer report about a robber and father who took his daughter to his robbery of a convenience store.

Security-camera videos implied that the daughter apparently was unaware that her father was robbing the store, but police were very concerned for her safety, the reporter said.

So the police searched for the girl and eventually found her in a safe condition.

But the reporter said “She was found safely.”, even though the search for the girl had no hint of danger.

This is an example of hypercorrection.

To say “She was found safely.” is to say that the finding of the girl was done in a safe manner — because “safely” is an adverb that modifies the verb “found”.

The solution comes from understanding the role of a predicate adjective.

Solution:
“She was found safe.”

“They are wanting a response by January 31st.”

Hypercorrection, Tenses, Verbs

I heard someone say this yesterday during a conference call.

Problem:
The continuous inflection of the present tense is unnecessary in this statement.

Explanation:
The label “present continuous” refers to a continuous inflection of the present tense.

The phrase “are wanting” is an example of the “present continuous” form of the verb “want”.

As explained at Wikipedia, the “present continuous” form is prevalently used in English to express current action but is rare or absent in other Indo-European languages.

There are at least two hypotheses about why American English speakers often choose the “present continuous” form of a verb over the “present simple” form:

  • One hypothesis is that saying something like “They are wanting …” sounds more educated to the speaker than saying simply “They want …”. One might even label this as a linguistic hypercorrection.
  • Another hypothesis is that using the “present continuous” form instead of the “present simple” form effectively softens the impact on the listener or reader.

No matter which hypothesis you prefer, the “present continuous” form is often unnecessary and tends to interfere with clear, direct communication.

Solution:
“They want a response by January 31st.”

“It can be cast in an heroic way.”

Adjectives, Hypercorrection

I heard this yesterday on NPR.

Problem:
The indefinite article is incorrect.

Explanation:
I was listening yesterday to an interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” about Barack Obama’s pending presidential inauguration when I heard, “It can be cast in an heroic way.”

The problem with this sentence is that the “h” in the adjective “heroic” is never silent.

So just as one should not say or write “an helpful man”, one should not say or write “an heroic way”.

I believe that the tendency among some speakers of American English to use the indefinite article “an” in front of the adjective “heroic” is a form of hypercorrection — as if to say, “If ‘a’ is correct, then ‘an’ must be more correct.”

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • ” a heroic” — 1,330,000 matches
  • ” an heroic” — 184,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct ” a heroic” versus the incorrect ” an heroic” by a ratio of 22.6-to-1, which is good but not great.

Solution:
“It can be cast in a heroic way.”