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We're not passing judgment, but in the following exchange it appears that Miss Duff has contracted a comical case of hypercorrection:
"Well, Dad--uh--Father is waiting downstairs to take us out to the park to play with the other little girls. Then we come back and have fried chicking for lunch."
"Chicken."
"Chicking."
"Chicken."
"Chicking," said Miss Duff. "Pronounce each word to its fullest."
(Peter S. Feibleman, The Daughters of Necessity, 1959)
Linguists Lisa Purse and Lyle Campbell define hypercorrection as "the attempt to correct things which are in fact already correct . . ., resulting in overcorrection and getting the form wrong" (Historical Linguistics, 2013).
The late journalist Alistair Cooke used the phrase grammar of anxiety to describe pretty much the same thing:
Who is to give [schoolchildren] warning signals about the whole Grammar of Anxiety, which springs from the chronic fear of being thought uneducated or banal and coins such things as "more importantly," "he invited Mary and I," "when I was first introduced," and "the end result"?
(The Patient Has the Floor. Alfred A. Knopf, 1986)
We're guessing that Miss Duff was once cautioned not to drop her gs and since then has fallen into the (bad) habit of changing -en endings (as in chicken) to -ing (chicking).
Feelings of linguistic insecurity (to use William Labov's phrase) can affect grammar and word choice as well as pronunciation. For instance, hypercorrection often results when the pronounswhom and whomever are mistakenly treated as the prestigious or college-educated versions of who and whoever.
To learn more about some common forms of hypercorrection, visit these pages:
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