Doug Fisher of Common Sense Journalism points out an interesting hypercorrection: “Lattimore finished with 27 carries for 176 yards and one touchdown, one fewer scores than defensive lineman Melvin Ingram.”
This is the sort of thing you get when someone learns a Rule—in this case, that less is used with mass nouns and fewer with count nouns—and applies it like a coat of thick varnish over every surface. But English doesn’t take well to Rules applied unthinkingly. As Professor Fisher points out, the idiomatic expression in English would be one less score than. It just is.
You also find hypercorrection in speech. Jan Freeman and I have had some friendly disagreement over the pronunciation of often, which can be pronounced with or without sounding the t. My view, which I am not prepared to abandon, is that sounding the t is a hypercorrection that over time has become so commonplace as to be acceptable.
There is some interesting information at English Language & Usage, which quotes the Random House Dictionary as saying that the t pronunciation was common until the seventeenth century, after which omitting it became common in educated British and American speech. “Common use of a spelling pronunciation” has restored it.
Thus, as literacy became more widespread, “spelling pronunciations” developed, either because people encountered words in print more than in speech, or thought that written language had primacy over spoken language. That coincides with my own experience growing up—mind you, I am not a phonologist—of hearing the t in often more commonly in the speech of schoolteachers, or African-Americans who had a college education, than among the slovenly pronouncing uneducated, who said offen and also commonly used ain’t.
But I’ll grant Ms. Freeman’s point that the t pronunciation has become widespread enough that it can no longer be considered solely as a marker of striving for upward mobility and might be a regional variant.
If any of you are interested in exploring other hypercorrections, please feel free to comment.