It’s just a furtherance of using “myself,” which it itself a “polite” or pseudo-formal circumlocution for “I.”
It is no more or less grammatical than merely using “myself.”
Did you see my post above? Your righteous indignation comes about 1200 years too late, because that’s how long people have been using the word in this sense.
In your example, I is the pronoun and myself adds emphasis. There was nothing wrong with the example in your post, and has no relevance to my post which you just quoted, which was not disputing that.
But my post also mentioned that “myself” has been used as a non-reflexive pronoun, as a subject or object of a verb (indeed, sometimes as the only subject or object of a verb), since the Middle Ages. Isn’t this the sort of use that you’re speaking out against?
Here are some examples from authors who many consider to have a good command of the English language, running the gamut from middle to modern English:
“My-selven can not telle why The sooth.” (Chaucer, 1369)
“Ther was also a Reve and a Millere, …and my-self.” (Chaucer, 1386)
“My selfe haue Letters of the selfe-same Tenure.” (Shakespeare, 1601)
“He tauld mysel’ by word o’ mouth, He’d tak’ my letter.” (Burns, 1789)
“No savage man inquired, ‘What am myself?’” (Browning, 1896)
It’s ridiculous to bemoan that people are “starting” to use “myself” as a non-reflexive pronoun when we’ve actually been doing it all along for centuries, in many cases in texts widely held to be the pinnacles of English literature.
No? Looks a tad ungrammatical to me.
She said it was spelted “Sara” …
“Myself” is not just another way of saying “I.”
It’s only for when you are referring to yourself in an action, for instance, “I cut myself.” You wouldn’t say “Myself went downtown.” Just as you wouldn’t say to someone else, “Yourself go first.” You would just say “You go first.” (You could say “Go f**k yourself,” because that involves the person acting upon himself, if such an act is even possible.)
Well, now they should stop.
Well, the phrase his/her good self is a kind of formulaic, now somewhat rare way to refer to another person with respect, wherein self takes on a kind of metonymic role. (Using it in the first person, though, is probably done humorously.)
Grammaticality in English (indeed, as probably in all languages) is not always a black or white issue, and there’s no reason why certain usages can’t be accepted in certain syntactic contexts where they serve a good, expressive and practical purpose.
Whether it be formulaic phrases which persist despite all the “rules” (woe is me), or patterns in certain contexts (using reflexive pronouns as subject pronouns in comparatives), that kind of simplistic, binary approach ignores how resourceful people can be with language.
Of course. But this isn’t one of those cases.
Yeah, okay. They should still stop.
Why? Just because you’ve decided to invent some arbitrary linguistic rule that conflicts with a millennium of established usage?
It’s not arbitrary.
So you are saying that someone like Oxford-educated, British writer Stephen Glover, co-founder of the Independent, is wrong and stupid, because he writes a sentence like this?:
[QUOTE=Stephen Glover, in New Statesman, Sept. 5, 2014]
However, what journalists such as myself wonder is why the excesses of the press can not be dealt with by the criminal and civil law, as in the case that led to the recent jailing of Andy Coulson and his two NoW colleagues.
[/quote]
Oxford-educated, eh? Then he should probably go by the Oxford dictionary.
BTW, note that this link does open the possibility of using myself in other ways, but only in narrow terms, which should please you–but not in the way Glover did.
That page doesn’t even address comparative structures such as the one I cited, so it’s not complete. But that’s beside the point, because it just says “many people object or dislike like” those other particular usages, which, of course, is true. On the other hand, I have many other examples of editors accepting the comparative structure, from publications such as Foreign Affairs, the Lancet, American Studies International, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, on so on, which is just to point out that it’s not a black or white issue. These are not proclamations from God–you don’t have to cling to them religiously.
Not clinging. Just saying I think they are wrong.
Nobody has pointed out that the thread title is in error?
“Grammatical” simply means a sentence uses grammar, not that it is grammatically correct.
But that’s not the Oxford dictionary; that’s a web page from the publisher discussing some aspects of the reflexive and non-reflexive uses of “myself”. What the Oxford English Dictionary itself actually says about “myself” was quoted in a previous message. I don’t know why you’re choosing to ignore it.
If you’d taken your own advice and consulted Oxford, you’d see that “grammatical” can be defined as “conforming to the rules of grammar”.
Didn’t see it. Oh well, never mind. I disagree with Oxford.
Well they should stop doing that too!