Where else but in prescriptivist poppycock would one find the seeds of the idea that a word that one hears said every day hundreds of times without anyone batting an eye could possibly never be grammatically correct? Regardless of whether this specific misapprehension was explicitly handed down from a purported authority figure or not, it takes the dominance of a certain anti-descriptivist mindset in society to allow it to be held past a moment’s reflection. I stand by the claim that such a state of nervous cluelessness is very much the effect of misguided mainstream attitudes towards language.
Also, the claim “His problem with the use of ‘myself’ evidently wasn’t that it violated grammatical rules” seems hard to quite square with the thread title “Is the use of ‘myself’ ever grammatically correct?”.
A reall quick check of Merriam-Webster’s online, which took me all of 10 seconds to do, shows that in America the past tense and participle is generall spelled this way, while British English has always spelt it this way, at least as a common variant.
How about in natural reactions of discomfort in response to unfamiliar or non-standard usages? For example, one hears constructions like “Give the book to John and I” all the time as well, but to many people that still just naturally “sounds wrong”.
I agree that it’s weird that the OP of that thread couldn’t think of an example where the use of “myself” would ever sound natural to him, but I think it’s silly to presume that he must be “dominated” by an “anti-descriptivist mindset in society” imposed by “authority figures”.
What the militant anti-prescriptivists refuse to see is that prescriptivism is also a natural part of language use. All language users think of certain constructions as “right” and others as “wrong” (as we see in the way that even illiterate parents who’ve never heard of grammar in the abstract will correct a young child for using a non-standard grammatical construction). The categories of “right” and “wrong” shift over time, but that shift never occurs totally unconsciously or painlessly.
The natural process of language change occurs as a struggle between the natural tendency of language users to create non-standard usages and the natural tendency of language users to resist non-standard usages. Just as a language is famously defined as a dialect with an army and a navy, a linguistic change is merely a linguistic error with majority support.
True descriptivism would recognize the natural presence of prescriptivism in language use and incorporate it into the description of language, rather than just railing at prescriptivism as the “dominating mindset” of some kind of sinister “authority figures” inducing “nervous cluelessness”. The fact is that natural language change naturally confuses people, because it occurs in partly random ways that violate the logic of prescriptive rules that language users naturally construct.
For example, descriptivists would claim that a construction like “Give the book to John and I” is a standard or accepted usage because many people use it, while a construction like “Give the book to I” is non-standard because nobody uses it. No problem with that, it’s what descriptivists do, by definition: they describe the usages of language as they actually occur in spoken language, irrespective of whether they’re logically consistent.
But it’s silly for descriptivists to complain about prescriptivist brainwashing when language users feel uncomfortable with some of the inconsistencies that language change produces. The prescriptivist logic that makes many people feel that both “Give the book to I” and “Give the book to John and I” just “sound wrong”, even though many other people think the second one “sounds right”, is a natural part of human language use, not an artificially induced state of “nervous cluelessness”.
I think that is a bad example because not only does that sentence sound wrong, it is wrong in a grammatical sense. “I” shouldn’t be used in the predicate, and just throwing the word “and” in front of it doesn’t make it correct. “He gave the book to I” or “He gave the book to we” are incorrect, so “He gave the book to John and I” is also plain wrong.
According to current rules of linguistic prescription in English, a sentence like “He and myself are going to the store” is just as “plain wrong” as “He gave the book to John and I”.
According to current linguistic description of English, “He and myself are going to the store” and “He gave the book to John and I” are both accepted or standard usages because many people use them, so neither of them can be accurately described as “wrong”.
(Yes, I understand and to some extent sympathize with your prescriptivist argument against using subjective-case pronouns as objects of verbs, but from the descriptivist view, such abstract grammatical arguments don’t trump the way that language is actually observed to be used.)
Your misapprehension about this exactly illustrates my point. Violating prescriptivist rules to create linguistic change and clinging to prescriptivist rules to resist linguistic change are both natural parts of human language use. The inevitable tension between them is always going to mean that many people (like Crafter_Man in the linked thread wondering how or whether to use the word “myself”, or like you in this thread thinking that “He gave the book to John and I” is indisputably “just plain wrong”) are going to be puzzled about how to define the exact status of any particular usage which is currently in the process of changing.
