“Myself”: Don’t Bother With It!

“Rachel and myself agree on this topic.”

“I remember myself taking the stage.” 

“The conference speakers will be Joe and myself.”

“Myself and my whole family are taking the cruise.”

STOP! DON’T! ICK! WRONG! 

I hear myself used incorrectly everywhere, mostly on television by people whose job it is to speak. Myself is a pronoun. However, it is an unusual pronoun because it is not a subject, and it is not generally a direct object. Actually, the second example above is probably okay, but it sounds weird to me. It is a direct quote I heard. You could leave out the myself entirely there.

Here are some correct uses of myself:

“I am proud of myself for accomplishing that.”

“I myself ate the whole pizza.”

“I did the whole puzzle by myself.”

“I put myself to sleep reading this boring book.”

What do you notice? Yup. The subject of each sentence is I — because that is how myself is used. It either intensifies I (as in I myself), or it reflects back to I (I am proud of myself), which is why the self pronouns are called “reflexive” and/or “intensive.” Those are the only uses of self pronouns. 

So, the answer is YES. When you use yourself, the sentence subject is you, and so on.

“You must be proud of yourself.”

“She can now ride a bicycle all by herself.”

“They themselves proved their point in the debate.”

But the whole -self thing can generally be avoided by omitting or rewording. Then the chances of using those incorrectly are greatly reduced!

“You must be proud” is probably good enough.

“She can now ride a bicycle” is probably good enough.

“They proved their point in the debate” is probably good enough.

“I am proud of accomplishing that” is probably good enough.

“I ate the whole pizza” is probably good enough.

“I did the whole puzzle” is probably good enough.

“I fell asleep reading this boring book” is probably better.

You want to use myself? Fine. Just don’t use it as a subject, and don’t use it anywhere in the sentence (of course, I am sure there are exceptions) unless the subject matches the pronoun.