“There was a meeting the other day with myself, Betsy, and Billy Bob, and we decided to move forward with the barn-raising.”
Sorry to pick on barn-raisers. I bet you’d never actually misuse the reflexive tense. But so many other people do that it hurts myself. (See what I did there? I mis-used the reflexive in such an egregious way that I hope you all recognized it without me pointing it out.)
Let’s check with my good friend Mr. Bernstein, whom careful readers of this blog know.
“The ‘-self’ words are used for two purposes: for emphasis (‘I’ll fix it myself’: ‘The others were hesitant but he himself had no qualms’) and reflexively, to turn the action back on the grammatical subject (‘She dressed herself quickly’; ‘He makes himself inaccessible’).
So please stop using myself as the subject of a sentence by itself, because it never will be. It will always be the object. (Myself opened the door. I opened the door myself.)
Don’t say that the people at the party were Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, and myself. It was just Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, and me.
And please don’t try to tell me that Coach Taylor is going to holiday in the Hamptons with the whole family: Tammy, Julie, the baby, and himself. It’s going to be him, Tammy, Julie, and that late-in-life baby he can bounce on his knee.
(Don’t get me started on hisself. You all know better than to use that.)
