In linguistic prescriptivism, a solecism is a grammatical or other mistake or absurdity. The word is derived from the Greek Σολοικισμος (soloikismos); from Σολοικος (Soloikos), "speaking incorrectly"; from Σολοι (Soloi), an Athenian colony in Cilicia whose inhabitants spoke what Athenians regarded as a corrupted and barbarous form of Attic. In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. ... A view of the Acropolis of Athens during the Ottoman period, showing the buildings which were removed at the time of independence The history of Athens is the longest of any city in Europe: Athens has been continuously inhabited for at least 3,000 years. ... Cilicia as Roman province, 120 AD In Antiquity, Cilicia (Ki-LIK-ya) was a region, and often a political unit, on the southeastern coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), north of Cyprus. ... Attic Greek is the ancient dialect of the Greek language that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. ...

Some examples of usages often regarded as solecisms in standard English are:

• "This is just between you and I." for "This is just between you and me." (hypercorrection arising from attempts to avoid the common "you and me" form in the subject of sentences; "me" is in fact the correct pronoun for the object of a preposition.)
• "He ain't going." for "He's not going." (dialectic usage; see ain't)
• "This is me and Leslie's house." for "This is Leslie's and my house." (from the assumption that 's is an inflection and not a particle)
• "Whom ate the food?" for "Who ate the food?" (hypercorrection resulting from the incorrect assumption that whom is simply a formal version of "who")

What is considered to be a solecism in one dialect of a language may be acceptable usage in another. Modern descriptive linguistics generally rejects the entire notion of solecisms, concentrating on how language is used, rather than prescribing rules as to how it ought to be used. Hypercorrection is (1) elaborate, prescriptively based correction of common language usage, often introduced in an attempt to avoid vulgarity or informality, that results in wording commonly considered clumsier than the usual, colloquial usage (for example, in English, adherence to the proscription against split infinitives or the ending of a clause... Look up aint in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ... In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. ... The pronoun Who, in the English language, is the interrogative and relative pronoun that is used to refer to human beings and some animals perceived as sentient. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ... Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is actually spoken now (or how it was actually spoken in the past), by any group of people. ...

Note that a solecism is an error of syntax, while a barbarism is an error of morphology. Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... Barbarism is a language error where a non-standard or an incorrectly formed word or expression is used. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ...

See also

Look up Solecism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Disputed English grammar
• Fowler's Modern English Usage
• Prescription and description