‘Plus-Sized’ College Student Claims Discrimination at Bar

[alcibiades_mystery]

107. There are, I think, two different reasons for these flawed constructions

1) She gave a slice to Sally and I - I also visibly flinch when somebody uses this construction. The obvious error, of course, is that the speaker or writer has confused subject and object. If you simply remove the "Sally," the error becomes obvious: "She gave the slice to I." Very few native English speakers would make that error, but many make the "Sally and I" error. Why? Quite simply, because they learned by rote and sound that adding a second actor in the subject slot should result in a "Sally and I" construction, and they simply transfer this to the object slot. Many, many native English speakers (especially as children) will say something like "Sally and me gave a slice of pie to Joey." This is obviously also incorrect (Me gave a slice to Joey), but it is common, so teachers spend a good deal of time correcting it: Sally and I, Sally and I, Sally and I. This construction is drummed into people's heads so frequently that they simply make it a general rule: whenever I am using first person pronouns and include a third person noun or pronoun in a list, place the first person pronoun last and make it "I." This is not a general rule, obviously, but, at best, a rule for constructing subject slot lists of actors. Rather than explain a subject and an object, and other grammatical features, however, most folks just get the general rule version, so they end up with "She gave a slice to Sally and I."

2) When you call the office, ask for either Robert or myself. - I don't think there is any teaching that would produce this, other than the general tendency to teach inflated (or "official&quot prose for business settings. People attempt to puff themselves up through language, and end up with these little errors of meaning and grammar as a result. (This is ironic, of course, since the speaker's intention is often to make himself sound more adept at language, while the actual usage produces the opposite result). Maybe "me" sounds too simple. Maybe "myself" sounds more sophisticated. Maybe (and I suspect this is the socio-grammatical answer) we have, as a culture, become so self-centered that everything appears to be reflexive: the self acting on the self, always. It's not clear what produces the "myself" nonsense. But -- goddamn -- is it annoying!