grammaticality - Use of "myself" in business-speak


Occasionally, I will hear or read coworkers using "myself" in place of "me," as in:



If you have any questions, you can contact Gimli or myself.


I have sent the list to Legolas, Glorfindel, Aragorn, and myself.



This sticks out to me every time I hear it, and seems like an attempt to sound more professional than if they were to say "Gimli or me".


It seems wrong because you would not say "You can contact myself."


I also wonder if "myself" is an attempt to avoid the confusion of "me" versus "I" in a sentence.



  1. Is this a valid use of "myself"?

  2. Has anyone else experienced this, or is it a Midwestern regional idiom?



Answer



This usage is justified by the usage notes in Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. See my answer to You and Yourself, Me and Myself for a discussion of the grammaticality of myself in non-reflexive constructions.


This usage probably comes from discomfort people have with selecting pronoun case in coordinates. There is a rule in informal English that you always use accusative case in coordinations of pronouns regardless of syntactic position (“My brother and me are hardly on speaking terms these days.”—you can find many examples like this in the Corpus of Contemporary American English), but there is also a rule in standard formal English that those kinds of coordinations are ungrammatical and you must use the nominative case. As a result, people are uncomfortable using either me or I because their intuition leads them to say me but the formal grammar they learned in school draws them towards I, so they “split the difference”, as it were, and use myself.


Edit: Shinto Sherlock correctly points out that the second example usage in the question is in fact a perfectly normal use of reflexive myself. I’m not sure either why it would be a surprising usage.


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