Me, Myself, and I
There’s a name for this particular grammatical overreach: hypercorrection. In other words, we’re so afraid of getting it wrong that we use a word we think sounds more correct — and end up getting it wrong anyway.
“Me” vs. “myself” is a particularly good example.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with “myself.” It’s a perfectly useful word when it’s doing what a reflexive pronoun is supposed to do, which is refer back to the subject of the sentence. You can say, “I hurt myself,” “I bought myself a new car,” or even “I told myself to calm down.” In each case, “myself” is referring back to the person doing the action. (If you replace the subject of each of the examples with “she” or “he,” you would use the corresponding reflexive pronoun, “herself” or “himself.”) A reflexive pronoun can also be used for emphasis, as in, “I myself confirmed the order.”
What you generally can’t do is use “myself” as a more sophisticated stand-in for “me.” That’s where sentences such as “Please send the report to Victoria and myself” go wrong. The report is being sent to Victoria and “me.” Adding another person to the sentence can make the pronoun choice feel trickier, but it’s not. There’s a simple way to check your grammar: Take Victoria out of the sentence.
“Please send the report to myself.”
That sounds wrong because it is. You’d say, “Please send the report to me.” So put Victoria back in, and you get: “Please send the report to Victoria and me.”
Of course, it’s not only “me” that gets incorrectly replaced. Sometimes the appropriate pronoun is “I.” The same problem crops up when “myself” gets put into the subject position: “Victoria and myself will attend the meeting.”
Again, take Victoria out: “Myself will attend the meeting” is clearly wrong. The correct version is “Victoria and I will attend the meeting.”
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