Comments on: Hypercorrection

By: The Only True and Living Nathan

The Only True and Living Nathan — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:25:17 +0000

Aw, shucks, you’re just buttering me up…

I mean the unspoken Mormon idea of “If THEY [i.e. Protestants] are saved by grace without works, we’re saved by works without grace!” And rather than giving a leaden rendition of the first couple of chapters of Stephen E. Robinson’s Believing Christ, I simply refer y’all there.

By: Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:51:59 +0000

TOTL Nathan, please elaborate. That part of the original post got dropped because I knew you could do a better job than I could.

By: The Only True and Living Nathan

The Only True and Living Nathan — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:01:31 +0000

I can’t believe I can come along after eleven comments (unless another has slipped in while I’ve been typing) and be the first person to mention the Mormon “grace vs. works” overcompensation.

By: Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 07:48:56 +0000

These are all good suggestions, but hypercorrection is a bit different than an overrigorous or pedantic insistence on correct practice–think of it as an attempt at pedantic correctness that goes spectacularly astray because you don’t know exactly what the correct standard is. I think Kevin’s example is quite good, better than the ones I came up with: we know we don’t use the cross as an element in our architecture or worship, so we don’t know quite what to do with it in the situations where we’re confronted by it. The solution is not to start wearing crosses ourselves, but to watch carefully for stepping into messes of our own devising when we do talk about the cross.

By: JKC

JKC — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:45:22 +0000

So is hypercorrection virtually the same thing, in a religious context, as building a hedge about the law? In that case, it could be said that part of Jesus’ ministry was to correct (or perhaps, de-correct?) hypercorrection. I would certainly think that that will be part of his second coming as well, to “set in order the house of God” as the D&C puts it.

By: manaen

manaen — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:41:19 +0000

Reverse hypercorrectness: not drinking caffeinated drinks around non-members solely because they believe the Church prohibits them although it doesn’t.

As a psych major, I completed an English minor in order to be able to communicate ideas much better than the published articles in psych journals. The English majors liked to say that other people would stop talking when they learned they were in the presence of an English major. My response was that when people would leave the room when they learned I was a psych major.

By: Capt. Obsidian

Capt. Obsidian — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:40:13 +0000

Slightly off topic… As a new missionary in Portugal, the only native I could easily understand was a Portuguese Elder who was an AP at the time. He had grown up around American missionaries and had adopted some of their linguistic mannerisms. He actually spoke Portuguese with an American accent. (He also spoke English quite well and was fond of saying, “Hooolllyyy freakincrud,man!”) I think his (unconscious?) adoption of these mannerisms is very similar to Wilfried’s example of the grammatically poor prayer ending that has found its way into Dutch congregations.

By: Wilfried

Wilfried — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:00:45 +0000

Thanks for the linguistic input, Jonathan!

A related interesting phenomenon is the influence of English on local languages in the international Church. Missionaries make transfer errors when speaking the local language (lexicon and syntax), but because of the use of those structures in a typical religious context and register, investigators and members may adopt those unwittingly. E.g. the formulaic “These things we pray for”, became in literal Dutch translation by missionaries: “Deze dingen bidden wij voor.” Erroneous in Dutch, but now often used by Dutch-speaking natives in Church. I guess it can be viewed as a form of hypercorrection. I’m sure there are many examples of this international mormonspeak in various languages.

By: Kevin Barney

Kevin Barney — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:43:34 +0000

I think your hypercorrection idea does provide a promising way to think about our interactions with others about religious things. An example that comes to my mind is a tendency for some LDS to view the cross in very negative, even evil terms. As a teenager I once (to my later, more mature horror) lambasted a girl for wearing “the instrument of Jesus’ torture” around her neck. That strikes me as a pretty clear overcorrection. True, we don’t use the cross in our tradition, perhaps out of Seeker simplicity or perhaps as a way of distinguishing ourselves from Protestant Christianity. But the symbolism of the cross is perfectly understandable and doesn’t require this kind of extreme overcorrection, yet some of us have a tendency to do that.

One could argue that the whole phenomenon of Mormon neo-orthodoxy is to some extent a hypercorrection to earlier, more traditional Mormonism.

By: KLC

KLC — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:36:51 +0000

I think you could call the prayer voice a hypercorrection. Some feel that talking with God on behalf of a congregation demands more than an ordinary tone and vocabulary.

I think general conference speak also has a quality of hypercorrection. Sometimes it seems like the only people who have permission to speak plainly in GC are the prophet and a few senior apostles.