About the use of “myself”

[crispysausagerolls]

Yes it’s petty, yes it’s stupid, yes there have been multiple threads on it but ffs i have just opened 3 threads in a row where people say “myself and DH” or “DS and myself”!

STOP ITTTTTT!!!!!!! 😬😬😬😭😭😭🙈🙈🙈

It’s almost as annoying as the use of caps lock and emojis 😄

@cologne4711

"Excited for" when people mean "excited about" nearly lost.

Can you explain this one a little further? Is "excited for" ever correct or should it always be "excited about."

I received this email from the labor party a while ago:

Join Keir and I to talk about what we can all do to support each other as part of Loneliness Awareness Week.

You wouldn't say "join I to talk about..." But as soon as there's another person involved, some people seem to think "me" is a no-no. I guess they've been told never to say "me and Keir went to X,Y and Z" and get mixed up.

I can't stand the use of "yourself" by businesses on the phone. I won't faint, or think you an uncouth brute, if you use the word "you".

He wanted a book on China. I always imagine any old book balancing on a map.

My DC had a Head Teacher who coined the following "rhyme" and thought it clever

Everyone at St Saviour's School
Working together for the good of all

We moved our children shortly after it was introduced.

Could of..

That is what kills me

@Yeahnahmum

Could of..

That is what kills me

This one doesn't annoy me too much. Where I grew up "Could've" kind of sounds like "Could of". I can see how people might get mixed up when writing especially if they didn't have a great education.

Turning nouns into bloody verbs is possibly worse.

'gifting'

Ugh I agree with everything on here. “Myself” provoked me due to the number of posts but “could of” hurts me just the same. And nouns as verbs “boobing” 🤢

Turning nouns into names. Particularly common amongst HCPs. "Now Mum" or " you Mum?". Respectively: the HCP is not my child, so please use my name; and no, I am not mum, I have the full power of speech or stop being lazy and say "are you Jane's, mum" They do it in letters too, Dr Smith the paediatrician and Sally Jones from the community nursing team agreed that mum would be able to use an aspirator.

.

Sadly the teaching of English grammar in England is shockingly awful (or was in the recent past)

How recent is "the recent past"? I was at school throughout the nineteen-seventies and was never taught English grammar. I remember a high-school English teacher's being surprised at some of the things we hadn't been taught at middle school, but she didn't have space in the timetable to fill the gaps. Of course, not having learned English grammar also made it harder for us to learn other languages.

It's interesting that, among my group of colleagues (all younger than me), the only one with a sound understanding of English grammar is Lithuanian.

OhTheRoses

Ugh, yes, I also loathe the use of “baby” without the preceding article. So insipid.

@OhTheRoses

Yes! So annoying!

It also annoys me in shops when someone says “club card?” Rather than use the actual
sentence “do you have a...” - it’s so lazy and rude. I know they ask it 1000 x a day but I don’t think one word is a question. Imagine if you both played that game

“Club card”
“No. Receipt?”

My theory is that it's a result of the English informal second person pronoun ('thou') having become obsolete. 'You' is now used both formally and informally - as there is no longer a way to distinguish the formal and informal 'you' this has driven some people to invent a form of address that they perceive as more formal or 'polite' - i.e. 'yourself' used non-reflexively, and it's gone on to infect 'me' as well. This is just a theory for which I have no evidence!

@WinterAndRoughWeather

Actually this gives me the willies. Hate it. Currently pregnant and get it a lot “how’s baby? How’s mum?”

Fuck off, that’s how 😁

Someone I knew very well was always saying ‘between you and I...’ or ‘...with dh and I...’. etc.

She evidently thought she was being ‘correct’, so the temptation to put her straight was great, but of course I never did.

My mother told me very early on to turn it around - ‘between I and you’ etc., and if that sounds wrong, that’s how you know. I suppose I was lucky to have parents who knew how to talk proper.

Re teachers making mistakes, a fellow teacher used to say ‘we was’ - this was abroad, teaching EFL to adults. She was a very forthright type anyway and got very stroppy when someone else (I wouldn’t have had the nerve!) said she shouldn’t say it in front of the students, since it’d confuse them when they needed to get such things right in their exams. ‘That’s how I speak and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can get stuffed!’ (Or WTTE.).

Grammar teaching now is thankfully much better. But it still has to fight predictive text and lack of proofreading.

Its and it's annoys me.

@Nanny0gg

That’s a stone cold classic.

I was taught a very simple rule in primary school to work out if it’s “I” or “me” - take the other person out of the sentence.

Mary and me went shopping or Mary and I went shopping?

Me went shopping or I went shopping?

@winterandrough

That’s how I learnt it too. Although my mother mistakenly always thought it was “and I”, without fail.

Hate when people put themselves first “I and John” or “me and John”.

Myself suggests that this is where yourselves need to be

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/pedants_corner

Turning nouns into bloody verbs is possibly worse.

I think I might be alone with this one as everyone seems to do it. But this is my grrrrrrr
Invite is a verb. It's an Invitation.

Invite is a verb. It's an Invitation.

Yes. Should be a sticky on every thread

@Worriedmutt, have you ever counted the number of times Priti Patel uses the word "actually"? You'd go mad trying, I swear.

Inappropriate use of "actually" and "obviously" may well become the new "myself". I'm hearing both more and more.

The compulsive myselfers should record themselves and hear how ridiculous they sound.

It particularly irritates when people bring out the dyslexia excuse when challenged about this one. It's absolutely not a mistake that results from dyslexia and it's really quite offensive to claim that it is.

Turning nouns into bloody verbs is possibly worse.

Yes!!

The one that really annoys me just now is "tasked with" - "I have been tasked with completing this project."