In traditional prescriptive grammar, a solecism is something perceived as a grammatical mistake

or absurdity, or even a simply non-standard usage. The word was originally used by the Greeks for
what they perceived as mistakes in their language. Ancient Athenians considered the dialect of the
inhabitants of their colony Soli in Cilicia to be a corrupted form of their own pure Attic dialect, full of
"solecisms" (Greek: σολοικισμοί, soloikismoí; Sing.: σολοικισμός, soloikismós).

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

 "This is just between you and I" for "This is just between you and me" (hypercorrection to
avoid the common "you and me" form in the predicate of copulative sentences, despite the
fact that "me" is the standard pronoun for the object of a preposition)
 "He ain't going nowhere" for "He isn't [or "he's not"] going anywhere" (dialectal usage;
see "ain't")
 "Whom shall I say is calling?" for "Who shall I say is calling?" (hypercorrection resulting
from the perception that "whom" is a formal version of "who" or that the pronoun is
functioning as an object when, in fact, it is a subject)
 "Irregardless" for "regardless" (nonstandard usage from analogy with constructions like
"irreverent," "irrespective," and "irrevocable," where the negative prefix "in-" changes to
"ir-")
 "The woman, she is here" for "The woman is here" (nonstandard usage with the double
subject "she")
 "She can't hardly sleep" for "She can hardly sleep" (a double negative, as both "can't"
and "hardly" have a negative meaning)
 "The issue is, is his attitude" for "The issue is his attitude" (see double copula)
 "Substituting A for B" when the intended meaning is "substituting B for A" or "replacing A
with B", i.e. "removing A and putting B in its place."
 "I could care less" for "I could not care less"
 "The reason being" for "The reason is..."
 "[People] have been evacuated" for "[Place] has been evacuated" (The thing {town}
evacuated is that from which other things {people} depart. If people are the thing, the other
things are generally considered to be faeces or bodily fluids. Hence, nobody has left, but
they have vomited or soiled themselves.)

What is considered a solecism in one register of a language might be acceptable usage in another.
For example, "The world keeps turning for you and I" (10cc) may be more acceptable in a song
(see Artistic license) than in prose.

Note that a solecism is a perceived error of syntax, while a barbarism is a perceived error of
morphology.