Stop saying 'myself and...'

[Ridiculous24]

I'm sorry, I'm grumpy.
It's everywhere.
The top level at work are now using it. They have English degrees.

They don’t say that though - or at least I haven’t heard it. They say ‘Imma try that’. Imma is a contraction of I’m gonna. You don’t get the gonna (or going to) as well. I think it’s based on certain American regional grammar variations and has spread.

If they know what I meant, then does it matter. Real life is not an academic essay.

My husband and I are nipping down the chippy then out for a pint of stout?
Its not posh. It’s grammatically correct.

That argument makes no sense. If you know the correct rules, why save them for best?

Like I said in my PP, the correct way sounds wrong and jarring to me. I don't feel comfortable with it. I speak as my brain dictates. People still understand me, and that is all that matters.

Do we have kids at the same school? The head put this in a newsletter last week! And it was conveying unwelcome news so just added insult to injury.

I didn't say it was posh.

I could have started this thread OP YA DEFINITELY NBU!!!! Why do people do it? It sounds so bloody stupid!

@XenoBitch , because they might find it grating or think you are uneducated.

Ha, no. When I was 20 I had a summer job as an audio typist - transcribing dictated letters for a small group of chartered surveyors. Every single letter ended with this phrase. I was super shy back then and don’t think I ever spoke to any of the surveyors, but I quietly changed this every time. They never commented. 😂

As previous Irish posters have pointed out it's perfectly correct in Hiberno-Irish grammar to use the reflexive pronoun differently. In that Hancock tweet someone screenshot earlier it seems to my ear that he's using myself correctly by Irish standards. A theory could be that Irish usage is influencing English usage? But on all threads on this topic people do give examples that seem ungrammatical in a Hiberno-Irish sense. In which case Irish usage could be influencing English usage but the grammatical rules aren't translating, maybe?

Using himself/herself to mark "a person of importance" is Irish too, as a PP wrote.

Who knows, perhaps the English can go back to using the correct "amn't" instead of "aren't" if enough time passes ;)

I agree completely on estate agent language being ludicrous though. It might be universal. Here in Sweden I once saw an ad for a house with "wonderful attributes", which seemed to be a surrounding fence.

I didn't take an offered job once because the person that would have been my manager kept saying, 'would that suit yourself?', 'would that work for yourself?'when describing the terms and conditions. The T and C were fine. The managers use of 'yourself' would have made me grind my teeth down to stumps within a month.

Doesn't the glottal stop just sound a bit daft? I can't imagine a high powered lawyer speaking that way?

I was talking to my husband about this last night.

We wondered whether people used to read more books and so would be familiar with the proper use.

Now people use social media more often and are more likely to see it used incorrectly pick it up thinking they are using it properly.

The glottal stop I believe is typical for certain London accents and is actually spreading now, including to American accents that haven’t previously had it. Check out Dr Geoff Lindsay on Youtube.

I have asked for my post to be withdrawn because it did not quote the post I intended.

I think people say it because they don’t know whether to use ‘I’ or ‘me’.

It gets on my nerves too.

🤣🤣🤣

@banivani , ....It's perfectly correct in Hiberno-Irish grammar to use the reflexive pronoun differently.
I work with people from various countries, and the use of what's acceptable in their own version of English is edited into British English. I'm usually the editor.

I'm often told by the writers that I their English is fine and doesn't need correcting. Unfortunately, it does. The target audience will be an international one.

You said ‘Try saying 'my husband and I' without sounding posh.....’ in the post I replied to. What else did you mean?

You were absolutely not being unreasonable to turn that job down for that reason!

That does sound overly formal/weird, despite being correct. Personally I wouldn’t say that but would still avoid “Me and my husband are nipping down the chippy” by e.g. “I’m going to nip down the chippy with my husband”.

Or ‘we’re just off to the chippy’.
I disagree it sounds either formal or weird though. It just sounds correct.

I completely agree, and can’t quite reconcile that with how much it irritates me when the speaker is not Irish.

I manage various teams in a professional setting. Those in Scotland, England, France and Italy I will happily correct on this for client-facing work. Those in Ireland, I wouldn’t dream of correcting.

(And I use amn’t myself as a colloquialism, but I hadn’t occurred to me that it is correct whereas “aren’t” isn’t 😅)