The Write Stuff
[vc_single_image image=”62069″]May 2018
Me, Myself and I
By Alan Crawford,
Impact Editor
There’s something you say as a kid that always prompts a parental response. You say, “Me and Bob are going to the playground,” right? And the parent says, “No, it’s ‘Bob and I,’ not ‘me and Bob.’” And you grow up thinking me is always incorrect, and I is always correct. And this notion — which is itself incorrect — gets firmly lodged somewhere in the angular gyrus. That’s why people who want to sound educated these days say and write “I” whenever in doubt. They’ll say, “She gave the Power Point slides to Debby and I,” when what is actually correct is Debby and me.
I won’t go into the grammatical rules here, which involve the subjective and objective cases, and that gets tedious. Ballplayers, BTW, who are not sticklers for grammar, either, routinely substitute “myself” when they want to say “me” but are afraid of making an error: “We’ve got a good infield this year, with Zimm at first, Murph at second, Turner at short, and myself at third.”
I won’t trouble you (or myself) with grammatical niceties. But I will offer a way to help you get it right and not sound affected by indulging in what the British comic novelist Kingsley Amis in The King’s English called “hyper-urbanism.” Amis defined hyper-urbanism as the “desire to sound more correct than correct and posher than posh. A hyper-urbanism occurs when a speaker puts into practice a badly taught or badly learned lesson about the avoidance of vulgar or rustic error.”
The trick is simply to drop the first of the two names (or pronouns) and see how that would work. You wouldn’t say, “She gave the wine list to I,” which of course sounds ridiculous. You’d say, “She gave the wine list to me.” Well, maybe some really pretentious people might say, “She gave the wine list to I,” but, because they are mostly cast members of the Real Housewives of New York, they probably don’t read this column anyway.
In addition to being the editor of Impact, Alan Crawford is a published author and journalist. His latest book, How Not to Get Rich, looks at the financial misadventures of Mark Twain.
Annoying Word of the Month: Kerfuffle. White House spokesman Ari Fleisher used this Britishism in January 2002, and now every Washington pundit uses it when they want to sound clever or witty — and sound just like all the other ones using it to sound clever or witty. See clown-car and kofeve.
Want More Information on This Topic?
Contact Alan Crawford, editor, Impact
Additional Resources
The Write Stuff – Reduce Redundancies
Public Affairs Writing Workshop – September 20
