With some irony, I think one of the proposed theories for the great vowal shift is 'middle class hypercorrection.'
I'm sure hypercorrection, middle class or otherwise, is the reason behind a lot of manglings of dirty foreign words - the aforementioned "massoose" being a prime example from the US.
Here in the UK, I often hear "coop de grah" for coup de grace, which will mean something very different to French ears. The idea of delivering a coupe de gras to finish someone off is quite amusing.
I am sure I've mentioned by request for the
buffet to be corrected by the waiter to the 'do you mean the burf-ET?' It turned out that I did because it was Texas and who knows if any given day isn't Bring Your Firearms to Work Day and I didn't want to the one supercilious hotel guest between him and an 'active shooter' incident on WNTV-9.
Re the great vowel shift, some didn't shift. I half-speak an obscure dialect called Erewashian and
fight is generally still pronounced as 'fate',
water as w-HAT-ter, etc. Time didn't so much as forget the place, as take an alternative route. Still, we only emerged blinking from our tunnels in the late 1980s, finally saved from centuries of molish servitude by the great St Margaret of Thatcher. Bless her. I never knew coal wasn't an actual vegetable before then.