Oooo... myself....

Have you noticed how call centre people, shop assistants, customer facing civil servants and local government officers and occasionally TV and radio personalities have started using “myself”, rather than “me”, or “I”? As if this were not bad enough, they are also juxtaposing “I” and “me”. The commonest error is to use “I”, because it sounds posh. It’s not; it just reveals the paucity of your knowledge of grammar. So stop it, now. 

These are the very same criminals who use “lesser” instead of “fewer”. Flogging is too good for them, but before I go around beating these low-lives, and probably getting myself arrested, I thought I’d explain in simple terms how to use me, myself and I.

Me and I

Easy. Say the sentence with only you in it. 

So, “The document had to be signed by Jane and I”, becomes “The document had to be signed by I”. This is plainly wrong – you would say “The document had to be signed by me”, so in turn you would say: “The document had to be signed by Jane and me.”

There – that was easy, wasn’t it?

Myself

For some reason, people feel uncomfortable with using “me”. It doesn’t sound posh or knowledgeable and is a bit too direct for some people. This is mostly because they’re stupid and they compound this stupidity by sounding thick as well. 

This results in tortuous constructs like: “The document had to be signed by myself”. Fuckers. Why don’t you use “me”? 

This paragraph is going to cause you trouble if you use “myself”, so you’d better not read it, it might hurt you. The rule for using first person singular pronouns is: it is ‘I’ when it’s a subject and ‘me’ when it’s an object. That’s very fucking simple, guys – but let me explain a simple method of determining if you should use “myself”. 

If the sentence contains the word “I”, you can use “myself” after it. So, “I kept the soft cushion for myself” is fine. “The soft cushion is for me” is fine. “The soft cushion for myself” is bollocks and you should be publicly excoriated with rusty barbed wire for using it

So, the next time you want to use “myself” try using “me” instead – if it sounds okay, it probably is correct and the same goes for those moments when you’re tempted to use the word “I”.  Try saying the sentence with only you in it and if it works with “me”, then that’s fine too. 

You’re welcome.