Me, Myself, and I

Now a word from our sponsor: the English language.

I’m going to go make the bold statement that everyone (ok, almost everyone) who enjoys and is good at reading, writing, and useage has a pet peeve regarding grammar. (This probably refers to everyone who is currently reading this blog.) For quite some time, my annoyance has been with misused punctuation, but examples of this are already well documented on some of my favorite blogs; we have the delightful “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, for instance, while the hopelessly mistreated apostrophe merits not only two blogs, Apostrophe Abuse and Apostrophe Catastrophes, but even an Apostrophe Protection Society in England. (Don’t you just love those Brits?)

Lately the thing that’s really been getting on my nerves is the improper use of personal pronouns. Particularly, I’m talking about using the subject form (“I”) when one should use the object form (“me”), along with the unnecessary use of the word “myself.”

Here’s an example of the former problem: “His mother always invited John and I over for dinner.” Or, to use an example more worthy of my favorite grammar book, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, “His mother then turned John and I into werewolves.”

Why, oh why, do people use “I” when they should use “me”? (More on this in the next paragraph.) Do they not know that the rule of thumb is simply to take the other person out of the equation and see how that sounds? Would anyone say “His mother then turned I into a werewolf”? (Hopefully you would never have to say you’d been turned into a werewolf, but if you did, you could at least use the proper pronoun.)

Why do people do this? I think it’s because when we’re younger, we are more likely to make the opposite mistake (i.e. use the object form when we should use the subject form), and some of us encountered a well-meaning but possibly despotic middle or elementary school teacher who so relentlessly emphasized that we should never say “John and me were turned into werewolves” that the offenders took this to mean never to use the word “me” unless absolutely necessary. What this teacher should have taught these offenders (and, in fact, probably did try to teach them, but they were only half-listening) is the same trick I mentioned above: take out the other person and see how it sounds. You wouldn’t say, “Me was turned into a werewolf.” (Well, maybe you would, if turning into a werewolf involves losing some language skills.)

The phobia against using the word “me,” I believe, also explains why people use “myself” unnecessarily. As in, “John’s mother invited John and myself to feast on human flesh.” Why use “myself” when a simple “me” will do?

I think one of the reasons this irritates me so much is because when people use “I” or “myself” when they should use “me,” they actually believe they’re not only correct, but they’re also believe they sound refined and elegant. Meanwhile, they’re just annoying the heck out of people like me.

Eventually, I will probably just have to resign myself once again to the linguist’s attitude — that the meanings of words change over time according to the dictates of popular useage. But I’m not yet ready to do that.

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