Misuse of myself ‘should be a capital offence’, suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. ‘As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you),’ he says.
I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson himself should have been slaughtered.
Historically, myself began not as a reflexive pronoun but as an emphatic, and as an emphatic it is often still used. Other constructions allow it too. In a letter in 1782, Johnson wrote that ‘both Williams, and Desmoulins and myself are very sickly’. There it is used as part of a compound subject.
Myself is often used after than, as in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: ‘These hands do lacke Nobility, that they strike/ A meaner than my selfe.’ Samuel Richardson in Clarissa has Lovelace say: ‘I have read in some of our perfectionists enough to make a better man than myself either run into madness or despair.’ I think some speakers would today be tempted to use me there.
John Ruskin, that great stylist, could on occasion simply use myself instead of me: ‘To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.’
R.W. Burchfield in his revision of Fowler’s Modern English Usage quoted a footballer on Radio 4: ‘They’ve made myself and my wife very welcome.’ That would not be stylistically questionable, he noted, if it had been phrased as ‘my wife and myself’. But Anne Plumptre ‘an extravagant worshipper of Napoleon’ and the author of a dozen books, wrote one in 1812 called The History of Myself and My Friend: a Novel. Critics complained about her opinions but not about the title.
What really annoys people is, ‘I’m voting for yourself’, the phraseology used on The Traitors, a television programme that I suspect my husband of having seen. But even he wouldn’t say: ‘Thank you for voting for myself.’
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