McFreedom

I didn't notice this until it was pointed out to me a while back, but misuse of "myself" has been growing dramatically. It appears people, when faced with a decision to use "I" or "me" in a sentence ("Bob and myself went to the store") have been substituting "myself" for the questionable pronoun. "Myself," is, of course, almost always wrong, but sounds more sophisticated. Personally, I think it's part of a greater trend I've noticed of substituting, larger, grander-seeming things for simpler, more correct things, which I call being pretentiously wrong.

Worse, of course, is that "myself" begins to creep, inevitably, into places where is no real question about the pronoun to use. Yesterday, I heard it shift even further, as a woman I was speaking to on the telephone said, "I'll get that right out to yourself." What? So much for all those theories of grammar that hold that things get simpler.

For the record, I'm not a prescriptivist. But I do believe that one should make an effort to speak in the way that people perceived as educated speak, and that's what I try to teach my children. No doubt, some would consider this to be pretentious. But it's pretentiously right.