Mixing up me, myself and I

Increasingly common misuse of pronouns irks readers

In this winter of our discontent, the misuse of pronouns is what heads your long list of pet peeves. I realized this after reading a variety of plaintive messages on the topic. Whether or not a lack of grammar teaching in schools is responsible, it’s clear that pronouns often appear today in non-traditional guises — and many readers of this column don’t like it at all.

One of those poor suffering pronouns is “myself.” Wendy Loucks pointed out a typical mistake in a recent speech by Donald Trump, who declared: “The president of Mexico and myself have agreed to cancel our planned meeting.” Instead of saying “myself,” Trump should have said “I.” Equally often, however, “myself” is an unwise replacement for “me.” As Saul Ticktin observed, “He told John and myself” is often used instead of “He told John and me.” Patricia Burns offered a comparable example: “your daughter and yourself.” In her words, “‘you’ will do just fine.”

“Myself” and a cluster of related words are what’s known as reflexive pronouns. It’s fine to deploy them when the object of a sentence reflects the subject (“Readers can congratulate themselves on their alertness”) or for the sake of emphasis (“She noticed the error herself”). But people who aim to uphold the long-held norms of grammar are unhappy when reflexive pronouns muscle in where they don’t belong.

Yvonne Millington, who now lives in Longueuil, asked me “whether as a child you had been required to memorize the English prepositions alphabetically. I was schooled in St. Kitts and Bermuda and we certainly had to.” Growing up in Western Canada, I did no such thing. But my schooling did enable me to recognize one of her pet peeves whenever I hear it: “This was a gift to my husband and I.” Why has this usage become so common? Jock Mackay gave a thoughtful explanation: “I think people consider it somehow impolite to say ‘me,’ as if ‘I’ always sounds more ‘cultured.’ One way of hearing the error is to remove the first pronoun and repeat the sentence; one would never comfortably say ‘She did nice things for I.’ ”

“I’m appalled,” wrote Peter Van Wagner, “that it has now become universally acceptable to say: ‘Me and my brother went to the store.’ People who say it would never say ‘Me went to the store.’ ” I had doubts about that phrase “universally acceptable” until I read similar messages from several other readers. “It seems that using ‘me’ as the subject of a sentence is prevalent everywhere,” remarked Susan Keess. “I was watching the CTV evening news a few weeks ago when I was horrified to hear Paul Karwatsky comment: ‘Me and my dad saw that.’ ”

For one further peeve about a pronoun — this time a relative pronoun — I’ll quote Terry Ballantyne: “I always shudder when I read about ‘people that’ did this.” Traditionally, of course, the phrase should be “people who.”

A few final, miscellaneous complaints. From Gail Goldstein: “I am tired of hearing people say ‘It is what it is.’ ” From Todd Schneider: “‘To call out,’ used as a synonym for ‘to denounce,’ is just immature.” From Dorothy Lipovenko: “Companies that say they are ‘going forward’: who the heck aims to go backwards?” From Stuart McKelvie: “RSVP is now a verb! ‘If you wish to attend, RSVP to …’ Ugh.” And let the last peeve go to Marty Haber: “When more and more people casually use strong adjectives, the result becomes counterproductive. If everything is ‘awesome,’ ‘amazing’ or ‘iconic,’ nothing is. We’ve become desensitized to once powerful and useful words. After you’ve lived next door to the garbage dump of language, the smell becomes difficult to detect.”

My thanks go to the hundreds of readers who sent in pet peeves over the past six weeks. In my next column, I’ll move on to other matters.

After you’ve lived next door to the garbage dump of language, the smell becomes difficult to detect.