yes, yet another grammar-pet-peeve thread from someone with no real problems, apparently…
On the drive home tonight I heard one reporter say “The mayor asked (Mr. Smith and) myself to assist with the project”
and more than one host use some variation on “…went with (Mary and) I to the event.”
Nobody else, other than me, will ever do anything with, or to, myself.
Nobody will ever go with I to an event.
I blame a crappy 3rd grade teacher somewhere way back when, but when? It was well before Ms. Crabapple, me am certain of that. Was it myself’s generation? The one before? Who started this nonsense and how do we stop it?
I don’t know whose (“who’s”) fault it is, but it comes from learning only half the lesson. Kids were constantly corrected for their naive grammar, but failed to get full point of object-subject agreement.
Kid says, “Me and Tom went fishing.”
Teacher says, “That’s wrong! ‘Tom and I went fishing.’”
Kid concludes: Uh oh! I shouldn’t say “me,” ever!
So, now, you have a nation that says, “Thank you for the gifts you gave to my wife and I. They were lovely.”
Yeah, but what we’re talking about here is known by descriptivists as hypercorrection, which in fact is a misguided attempt to apply the “dusty books” that becomes pompous and silly:
The incorrect “I” (“She came with John and I”) is bad enough, but the whole “myself” thing drives me crazy. It’s one of those things that people do because they think it’s actually more formal and correct, but they end up sounding completely ridiculous.
I don’t want to get into yet another prescriptivist vs. descriptivist linguistics debate, but I have to point this out.
(various emphases mine)
Okay, if you’re going to be pedantic, at least get the subject of your complaint right while you’re complaining. You’re complaining about people not following prescriptive grammar rules with regard to the two first person singular cases.
In the quoted passage, the text in red is a compound subject. Pronouns in subjects, with limited exceptions that don’t apply here, should be in the subjective case. The underlined and enlarged word is a pronoun in the objective case.
You wouldn’t say “Me will never do anything with myself.” You would instead say “I will never do anything with myself.” Thus, if you want to be prescriptive, the quoted passage should read:
In this context, I believe “other than me” is an adjectival prepositional phrase modifying the subject, and “other than” is a compound preposition semantically equivalent to “besides”. That makes the pronoun the object of the prepositional phrase, so “me” is correct.
The “else” is redundant, I think, and that makes the construction a bit more awkward than it has to be, but I don’t think it’s technically incorrect.
really it goes:
Kid says, “Me and Tom went fishing.”
Teacher says, “That’s wrong! ‘Tom and I went fishing.’”
Kid concludes: teacher is not making any sense, I was with Tom the whole time and the teacher was not there, but it’s not pleasant to correct her, so yeah I’ll tell her what she wants to hear.
I am not bothered much about mixing up “me” and “I”, although I try to get it “correct” (:rolleyes:) when speaking in a formal setting, and I do wince a little when my coworkers and boss get it wrong in front of others. However, I too find gratuitous insertion of reflexive pronouns grating.
It’s a bit hypocritical, since I consider myself pretty descriptivist, but it’s a little embarrassing to have the boss talking about how “myself joined the center” when we’re at a conference in DC in front of a congresscritters and their minions.
On a somewhat related note, I’d like to add that no matter how many times people say it, I cannot “look myself in the mirror”. Whenever I hear this, it makes me want to stab myself in the eye. See what I did there? I stab him, I stab you, so I stab myself. Fine. But I look at him, I look at you, and so, I look at myself.
