ATTENTION ENGLISH SPEAKERS: "myself" IS A REFLEXIVE PRONOUN

WTF

-- Tim Finney (tfinne...) (webmail), August 24th, 2006. (link)

(Sorry Tim! :-( )

I think it may originally have been a cop-out for someone who couldn't figure out whether to say "me" or "I." But then lots of people seem to have decided that referring to yourself with two whole syllables was incredibly professional-sounding, so now, whenever people are looking to sound refined or serious-minded, out comes "myself."

The funny thing is that it's used just as much by people who are seemingly refined and serious-minded! It's taking over! All for no reason I can think of, except that little words like "I" and "me" started to strike people as low-class and boring.

NEVER SURRENDER

http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/wallflower7318/imgs/4/3/43712ad7-s.LZZZZZZZ

I recognise this trait because myself and some of my IRL friends share it, to a certain extent.

Correct, because here it only emphasizes "I" :

I recognise this trait because I myself and some of my IRL friends share it, to a certain extent.

So in the year 2025, after the schoolmarms stop complaining, you'll ask "who's the best little kid in the whole wide world?" and your daughter will say "myself am!"

I recognise this trait because I myself and some of my IRL friends share it, to a certain extent.

The second one is also wrong because the pronoun that references the speaker is supposed to follow all other nouns/pronouns in the compound subject/object.

I recognise this trait because some of my IRL friends and I share it, to a certain extent.

There's a "me, I..." construction that you could use if you really wanted to have that type of emphasis ("As for me, I'd never do that to a friend unless he owed me money.").

The category is Language.

certainly possible (but not really the usage dan described)

burn

DETAILS.

this myself construction is really annoying to me too. even more so when you try to explain nicely to someone what reflexive means.

xpost

total burn

My amateur dictionary has two explanations for "myself":
1. reflexive form of me
2. emphatic "me"

but I can't seem to think of any natural sounding examples of the second one... How do you use "myself" (2) then?

I've heard some HORROR stories of people who hire long-distance movers. Although Jeff, Jesse, and my do-it-ourselves long distance move was kind of its own horror story, too.

Actually, now that I read it again, I'm not sure it is grammatically correct. Should it be "Jeff's, Jesse's, and my"? That sounds even weirder. Or is leaving off the possessive for Jeff and Jesse okay, as it would be if you said "Jeff and Jesse's move" and left off "my" altogether?

Personally, I try to avoid these constructions.

Also BOO ON MERRIAM-WEBSTER for excusing this awful, awful usage:

Myself is often used where I or me might be expected: as subject <to wonder what myself will say -- Emily Dickinson> <others and myself continued to press for the legislation>, after as, than, or like <an aversion to paying such people as myself to tutor> <was enough to make a better man than myself quail> <old-timers like myself>, and as object <now here you see myself with the diver> <for my wife and myself it was a happy time>. Such uses almost always occur when the speaker or writer is referring to himself or herself as an object of discourse rather than as a participant in discourse. The other reflexive personal pronouns are similarly but less frequently used in the same circumstances. Critics have frowned on these uses since about the turn of the century, probably unaware that they serve a definite purpose. Users themselves are as unaware as the critics--they simply follow their instincts. These uses are standard.

I NO LONGER TRUST THIS HANDY INTERNET RESOURCE

Mirror, mirror on the wall
Tell me, mirror, what
is wrong?
Can it be my De La clothes
Or is it just my
De La song?
What I do ain't make-beleive
People
say I sit and try
But whan it comes to being De La
It's just me myself and I

It's just me
myself and I
It's just me myself and I
It's
just me myself and I

can somebody please explain what the fuck this means? so like, whenever I'm telling a story about something that happened to me, I can just go pronoun-crazy?

Every one of those M-W examples sounds better when you use "me"

Hypothetical example:

Imagine a police officer who says: "At night, everyone drives faster. I myself have inadvertently broken the speed limit on a number of occasions at night."

Wouldn't that be correct? (even if "Even I" would be better?)

Webster's logic there is at least something to contend with, and they do a decent job of tracing how this goes from really minor infractions to today's myself free-for-all. (Though the Dickinson is a shit example; Dickinson is always a shit usage example.) Bernard, the object-of-discourse thing is referring to constructions like, you know, "old timers such as myself," where the "myself" kind of takes the speaker out of it -- you're referring to yourself as if you're not necessarily yourself, really.

this one has simple explanations of the basics and a juicy takedown of william safire.

(although its central premise, that language is instinctual, is by no means universally excepted by linguists. it's a fun, dorky read regardless. myself, i liked it.)

1.
2.
3.

The first two work, I think, because "myself" here connotes a stronger sense of self-regard than "me" would. It functions almost like "yours truly." And somehow, I think "like" or "such as" help introduce this affectation without it seeming abrupt or out of place.

The third works because the parallel with "my wife" gives it more fluidity when spoken.

I mean:

1. an aversion to paying such people as myself to tutor
2. old-timers like myself
3. for my wife and myself it was a happy time

I missed this post, but this is exactly why I think "yours truly" would be a good substitution here.

Bernard, I think the source of the "outside the discourse" thing stems from a sentence like "I cut myself." In that sentence, both "I" and "myself" refer to the speaker, but there's some beyond-grammar level on which "I" refers to the speaker more -- it's the usual "I," whereas the "myself" is the self as an object, removed from "I." It's like an out-of-body experience: "I floated on the ceiling and looked down on myself." So substituting "myself" for "I" is kind of a form of self-negation, a way of taking yourself out of it (which would explain why it strikes people as sounding very professional). It's less the first-order "me" and more "me, the concept."

In this case, I think it's two things: 1) Because it's at the beginning of the sentence, the speaker thinks it's weird and possibly wrong to use the word "me." 2) The parallel "my"s in the phrase "my wife and myself" suggest an internal logic to their usage, not to mention have a nice ring.

Who is who, btw?

Umm, WTF: no linguist thinks this. Language is a standard. By definition. It's a convention. The whole point of a language is that its speakers all agree to some extent that certain words mean certain things, and that one arrangement of words means one thing, while another arrangement means another.

So "language doesn't need standards" is ... baffling. You can certainly argue that language doesn't need standards as firm as the ones we're talking about here, but you absolutely do not mean that "language doesn't need standards." Anything without standards isn't a language.

language doesn't need standards, it has them naturally built in. your comment that i was replying to implied that you thought language could use some sort of inspectors or governing body or something:

Linguists are scientists; they study language. Invaluable as their expertise may be in matters of grammar, they're just not in the business of establishing standards

if portugal was part of spain, rather than its own country, portuguese would probably be considered a dialect of spanish. of course that wouldn't help a spaniard understand it any better. some linguists are fond of saying that a language is just a dialect with an army.

languages are constantly evolving and splitting. chaucer wrote in a language called english, but the canterbury tales is wicked hahd for people from 20th century boston to understand. so hard that the language is often referred to as middle english.

And, right, the development of those conventions has been totally anarchic and democratic and all that, but there are still clear factors that shape it. The main thing is to be understood, yeah -- you want clarity and communication. That's the most basic enforcer: can people understand you? But that's enforced via a whole system of power structures, too: not just numbers, but actual power. (If you're a serf for a guy who calls wheat "wheat," you're not going to get very far calling it "rice.")

And that's just for the rudiments of language, the very basics. When you get to the minor stuff like this, there's a huge element of conscious prescription -- e.g., people taking it upon themselves to create dictionaries and regularize spelling. They didn't do this to be dicks to everyone else -- they did this in an effort to make language work better, to make more people understand one another more efficiently and clearly. And you can't pretend you don't do the same thing, every day. We're all constantly enforcing language standards, every time we ask someone to clarify something, every time we note that someone spelled something "wrong." If someone says "hey, look at that dog," and you say "dude, what are you talking about, that's a cow," you're enforcing a language standard.

So you can say what you want about minor grammatical standards -- they're totally minuscule fine-tuning maneuvers, yes, being applied to speech that completely passes the "can we understand it" test. But if we have an interest in making language even more clear and efficient and useful, then it's entirely up to people to sort out, agree on, and push toward the acceptance of certain language standards -- the same way some cavemen somewhere reached some kind of agreement that "garf" meant fire, and then ran into other cavemen and sorted out some sort of anarchic agreement that now "blorg" was going to mean fire, because the other cavemen said "blorg" and had bigger clubs.

People always trot out the "language changes" argument as if it means, somehow, that people shouldn't have opinions about what would be good ways for language to change and what would be bad ways. One of the things that makes an interest in grammar today fun is that instead of looking to Latin for rules, we can actually think about individual changes and how they do or don't help the language become clearer, more efficient, more flexible, more expressive, etc.

dictionaries are a tools to understand written language - which humans did invent and teach to each other and need make rules about.

of course people had been talking to each other for at least a million years before the first dictionary.

People always trot out the "language changes" argument as if it means, somehow, that people shouldn't have opinions about what would be good ways for language to change and what would be bad ways.

the the whole thing is waaaay beyond anyone's control (which is not to say you can't have an opinion). it's just this good/bad point of view underestimates how deeply language is embedded in the human experience.

ps scourage - what you said about chaucer is untrue. there's actually quite a bit of difference in the structure too.

This is maybe the greatest thing myself has read today.

There's one part where might agree with you, and it's the difficult thing about grammar bitching: people will naturally and anarchically develop speech that allows them to understand one another, yes, but there are certain fine-tuning things they're unlikely to ever bother with. Internal consistency is one of those things -- if one bit of speech interests people, they're not going to compare it to the internal logic of grammar and wonder if it throws something off way down in there, or whether it'll send some other unrelated phrase off balance. By the time we get to fine-tuning things like "myself" as reflexive, we're trying to put an overarching logical system around language, one where it's about the structures and not the words -- but people think about language on an "embedded" word-based level, so they're not concerned with the integrity of the system.

Just because our convention-making for written language was more conscious and intentional than our convention-making for speech doesn't mean that the same mechanisms weren't in play.

yes i would have to say that it does mean the same mechanisms weren't in play - or rather that if one looked at that situation, they would find that different mechanisms were responsible for the development of written and spoken language.

if anyone's interested in reading something that argues my point but is written by someone who, like, actually knows what he's talking about - here's stephen pinker (the guy who wrote the book i linked to upthread):

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

We're thinking of a coding tweak for nuILx to make that easier.

For one thing, he fudges something hugely important: apart from an appeal to descriptivism, he can't identify any line between language-rules that are natural and language-rules that belong to "mavens" and "make no sense on any level." The very nature of descriptivism would imply that this line is different for every person; it would also suggest that the line is curiously dependent on people's education and interest in language. (In other words, created by social dynamics and social conventions.) Pinker does not routinely use words like "ain't" or constructions like "he don't" in his writing; he doesn't start off "Language be a human instinct." If he did, his writing would be less likely to be printed in national magazines. This means that he's following language-rules, partly as enforced by cold, hard economics. If he has reason to do that, doesn't it suggest that other people have very practical non-philosophical reasons to follow rules?

His picking out a few rules that have lost a bit of their spring doesn't do much to counter the fact that most grammatical rules -- including the really basic ones Pinker silently follows while writing, like everyone else -- have important functions. To steal from Wallace:

Some of these rules really do seem to serve clarity, and precision. The injunction against two-way adverbs ("People who eat this often get sick") is an obvious example, as are rules about other kinds of misplaced modifiers ("There are many reasons why lawyers lie, some better than others") and about relative pronouns' proximity to the nouns they modify ("She's the mother of an infant daughter who works twelve hours a day").

(You can say "oh, those make sense in context, an infant doesn't have a job," but that kind of excuse becomes really flimsy when we get into the kind of language that's far removed from our everyday speech -- legal documents, scientific and philosophical writing, detailed technical instructions, etc. You map that infant problem onto a convoluted clause about tax law and you're fucked.)

Which just wraps around to the pretty convincing group Wallace stakes out on this, mostly with regard to dictionaries and usage guides and such. These things exist because people buy them. And people buy them because they want to know the right way to do things. They reach for them when "being understood" isn't sufficient, and they want to demonstrate mastery -- writing cover letters, writing papers, etc. You can make all these appeals to the innate rightness of any native speaker, but the thing is that no actual native speaker would accept that -- everyone will admit that their language is imperfect, personal, haphazard. When they want it not to be like that, they'll turn to someone who's sat down and thought about this stuff and ask for a judgment call: "Am I doing this right?" And that judgment call has to look at both descriptive stuff (what do people actually say and understand?) and stuff that leans toward prescriptive (what would be the ideal, most useful rule in this instance?).

So Pinker's dead wrong about two things. One is that he assumes the people dictating grammar are copyeditors and Bill Safire -- rather than every consumer out there who wouldn't likely buy insurance from a guy who said "ain't" too much. The other is that he thinks he's defending common speakers, when in fact common speakers quite often want to be able to do it the "right" way, even if they'll speak the same way they always have when they're talking to their friends.

aka Nova Scotia

that language is so equated with power speaks to its subconscious lurking iceburgness.

btw nice suggestions the both of you.

oh man, freaky -- I was just reading about this earlier today when I was reading elementary-school students' hog-farming FAQs to try to remember the eighth major breed of swine (it was Spot(ted), which I always forget)!

by whom and were do me finds dis stuff? ta freinds
k bye
C