Brace yourself for tear gas and a baton charge by the grammar police. The greatest crime against the English language is no longer the misuse of apostrophes.
Please direct questions to Emma or myself. Does that work for yourself? The sub-editors and myself will be vigilant about standards in this newspaper. Britain has a reflexive pronoun epidemic. Blame call centres and corporate emails.
“Me” and “you” are small words but adequate. Yet plain speech is feared in some companies: too blunt, assertive, or human. Instead we are peppered with extra syllables. “Myself” and “yourself” are linguistic panic buttons, attempts at faux deference, which is why they are scattered across corporate discourse.
Railing against them risks sounding snobby. But they are gibberish, not a healthy evolution of our language. As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you) in the sentence. I hurt myself.
Instead they are now vomited into conversation with abandon. The cultural seepage has infected TV, blighting the latest series of The Traitors. “For myself, I wasn’t sure… so I voted for yourself.” (There, the perpetrators seek emotional distance, to reduce gameshow conflict.)
The problem has become so pernicious that those scammers who pretend to call from your bank even refer to their victims as “yourself”, in a botched attempt at respectability – as one of our production journalists can attest.
I have struggled to persuade colleagues that the crime should become a capital offence. Perhaps, then, we could reintroduce village stocks – let’s place them in supermarket car parks across Britain – so perpetrators may be pelted with rotten fruit.
How does that sound for yourself?
@olyduff
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