accusative cursing

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Apr 8, 2007, at 8:59 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> It sounds slightly awkward to a well-read chap like myself but
> hardly unusual.

so pleasing to see this antecedentless "myself".  it's the third i've
noticed in ADS-L (the other two were from Lal Zimman and Fred
Shapiro) -- and i haven't been actively searching for them.

MWDEU notes that commentators for over a hundred years have objected
to such uses of "myself": "Two general statements can be made about
what these critics say concerning _myself_: first, they do not like
it, and second, they do not know why." (p. 647)  meanwhile: "The
handful of commentators who have done real research have found the
usage surprisingly widespread in literary sources."

despite this, antecedentless "myself" continues to be deplored,
especially in advice intended for hoi polloi.  so, Joanne Feierman's
Action Grammar gives a list of "mistakes your boss minds most". her
top ten grievous errors include five from speech and five from
writing -- and "myself" makes it into both sublists, so that it
appears *twice* in the top ten list.

and the grammar section of Scott Kunkel's 80/20 Guide to Top Quality
Business Writing, which also proposes to list just the most important
errors (the 20% of types that account for 80% of error tokens), is
very stern about "misusing reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself)".

these are just two that i happen to have close to hand.

oh yes, at the high end of the advice literature, Bryan Garner (GMAU,
2003) dislikes untriggered "myself".  no doubt there are many more
recent deplorers out there.

the after-the-fact justification given in some sources for the
proscription is that (non-emphatic) reflexives must refer to the
subject of the sentence, so that jon's sentence is bad because
"myself" doesn't refer to "it".  (i've couched this explanation in
pretty much the form that the advice books give it, rather than
trying to fix the terminology.)

sez who?, i can hear jon asking, reasonably enough.

arnold

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