Something weird is afoot in our culture, and it’s indicated by an increasingly bizarre deployment of reflexive pronouns. The first time I became aware of this phenomenon was just before a visit to a property in which my wife and I were interested as potential buyers. Beforehand, I received an email from the estate agent which began, “I look forward to meeting yourself at the property at 11am, where myself will be waiting for your arrival.” Naturally, in anticipation of the house viewing, I tried to imagine what this spatio-temporal encounter of selves might look like.
Since then, I have received numerous emails from people expressing hope that “yourself has enjoyed a good Christmas,” or that “myself and my wife were sorry to miss you” at such and such event, or “ourselves will get to the event early.”
As my readers know, I enjoy perusing fieldsports magazines, but the peculiar—though fast becoming conventional—use of reflexive pronouns is ruining them for me. Recently, one of my favourite mags had a guest editor whose opening piece read: “I hope you enjoy the content that myself and the rest of the team have commissioned.” A nice sentiment, but I was already not enjoying it at the first page on account of the spazzy wordsmanship assaulting my leisure reading.
As it happens, I can cope with the occasional grammatical dog’s breakfast when it comes to pronouns. I, on occasion, have said things like, “You shall meet my wife and I at the gallery,” only immediately to realise that it’s my wife and me who will be met at the gallery, simultaneously trusting that my converser either hadn’t noted my syntactic blunder or is too polite to point it out.
The horrendously expensive education which my parents purchased for me as a child was, it seems, insufficiently pricey to provide me with any lessons whatever in grammar. Hence, in adulthood, I’ve had to invent all sorts of ‘rules’ not to sound too stupid.
For example, before talking, I often mentally remove the other person from the sentence: “You shall meet I at the gallery.” Well, that doesn’t sound right, I say to myself. So, I change the I to a me and then pop my wife back into the sentence. I’ve got pretty good at doing this quickly enough, and if it does take me a moment to spit the sentence out, hopefully others just assume I’m absorbed in profound thought.
That’s one way I just about manage not to sound like a moron. … Or do I? For of course, if I’m speaking such proper English to someone who is accustomed to announcing that “myself and my wife will be at the gallery,” my converser may think I have no idea how to construct a sentence. So, you see, the collapse of English syntax isn’t just making us all sound idiotic, it’s causing those who know how to speak properly appear idiotic to those who don’t. Indeed, this collapse is generating all sorts of uncomfortable social tensions, the rules for undoing which are known to no one.
The widespread grammatical chaos I highlight partly came from an impolite habit of placing oneself first in the sentence. People started saying things like, “Me and my wife will meet you at the gallery.” But if such a person were to apply my rule and remove his wife, he would have: “Me will meet you at the gallery.” A sentence fit for a caveman, certainly, but not for a beneficiary of three millennia of civilisation.
The prevailing, solipsistic prejudice of modernity is to see oneself as first in any event, and the rest of existence as orbiting oneself. As such, it is easy to see how ‘me’ in that sentence evolved into ‘myself,’ given that modernity has done a very comprehensive job of teaching us that it is my self that really matters.
There may, of course, be a class dimension to this. In England especially, the unhappy disappearance of regional and class-based dialects and accents, in favour of a butchered ‘received pronunciation,’ followed the egalitarian mania of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successors in both the Conservative and Labour parties. But throughout the West more recently, the decline of any expression of the regional, the particular, and the settled has coincided with the tech age and the fact that general communication has moved out of the concrete community and into the ‘online community.’
This transformation of human interaction has concurred with an unspoken insistence that working class people begin to despise their roots and pretend to be middle class, adopting all the same base, bourgeois mannerisms and social commitments. To use the distinction of David Goodhart, they must cease to be people of somewhere and be people of anywhere—for only then, can they become fully utilisable as interchangeable units of production and consumption. And that means leaving behind whatever ties them to a particular place and community, especially the way they express themselves.
It is this process of deracination that may be the key to understanding the weird use of reflexive pronouns so prevalent today in English-speaking countries. For this now common use of reflexive pronouns betrays a greater comfort with selves than persons. Other people would rather meet my self than meet me.
The notion of the ‘person’ implies embodied presence. When I speak of being “personally present” or being with you “in person,” I mean that I will be, concretely and actually, with you. For example, one might say, “I’d prefer not to talk over the telephone, but meet with you in person.” I cannot be personally present to you over the telephone precisely because my disembodied voice is not me, but a re-created, technologically mediated emanation of me.
As we are ever less personally present to one another, and instead interacting via technologically contrived mediators, we are becoming ever less comfortable with persons and we evermore prefer disembodied ‘selves.’ Hence, increasingly, people will be unready to meet me in person, and if they must, they shall insist that themselves are meeting myself, and will progressively speak in this mad way, as indeed they are.
And it is mad. In the West today we are obsessed with pronouns precisely because we think that pronouns, disassociated from the body and its distinctiveness (like, for example, its sex) denote some interior being called the ‘self’ which, as it happens, I have never seen and about whose existence I’m agnostic. And modernity’s superstitious belief in the ‘self’ is now fully reflected in our bastardised English, and as such it is seriously pissing me off.
Descartes’ mythos of the encaged self in the fleshly vehicle has turned into a working anthropology by means of technology and is intensifying due to the social pathologies that new technologies are fomenting. The rising idiom of the moronic, modern West is revealing this fact.
It is distressing to me that the ‘fool’s pronoun’—as I think I’ll start calling the syntactically skewed use of the reflexive pronoun—is even cropping up in fieldsports magazines, as embodied activities like fieldsports are among my prescriptions for healing the social disease of the ‘self.’
When I get an email saying, “I hope you had a good Christmas” or “My wife and I were sorry to miss you,” or indeed “I thought to myself that it would be nice for us to meet up,” it’s an indication that my interlocutor knows the basic structure of the English language. But it also suggests that he still has a foot on the earth. That, I can assure you, inspires in me some confidence.
