Me, Myself, and I

Can we just have a little grammar talk?

For some reason, adults consider it the utmost sin for children to use “me” instead of “I”. We always hear the “Me and Amber–” “Amber and I!”, which is often correct. But not always! You never list yourself before the other person in your sentence. But that doesn’t mean you can never refer to yourself as “me”. That is who you are, after all.

Our very own President Obama has been known to make that grammatical error on multiple occasions. He used it in phrases like: “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “the main disagreement with John and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.” Ugh. Bothers me to no end. Believe it or not, this was a contributing factor to my voting decision. Very small, but it was there.

To be clear: the rule here is that we use “I” as a subject and “me” as an object, whether the pronoun appears by itself or with something else. So every “I” in those quotes should have been a “me.” And he thought he was sounding so professional. They all do. As an item of interest, it turns out the term for this linguistic phenomenon is called “hypercorrection”. 

Because of that obsession adults seem to have with “me”, humans around the world, at least English speakers, have been conditioned to never use it. Another escape from that sinful word is “myself”. So odd. Just call yourself who you are! Obama has been known to use this one as well, along with many other individuals, including my high school Psychology teacher, who used it excessively. (He also said “expecially”, which is just funny.)

For the record: “I” is a pronoun that must be the subject of a verb. “Me” is a pronoun that must be the object of the verb. The easiest way to decide what to say is to remove the other noun from the sentence and see if it still makes sense. It’s that simple. And just forget “myself”. It’s rarely correct.

You know, TBC. I have way more of these grammar issues that I might need to just vent about. [Anticipate apostrophe usage sometime soon.]