Use of "myself" in business-speak

Question

Occasionally, I will hear or read coworkers using "myself" in place of "me," as in:

If you have any questions, you can contact Gimli or myself.

I have sent the list to Legolas, Glorfindel, Aragorn, and myself.

This sticks out to me every time I hear it, and seems like an attempt to sound more professional than if they were to say "Gimli or me".

It seems wrong because you would not say "You can contact myself."

I also wonder if "myself" is an attempt to avoid the confusion of "me" versus "I" in a sentence.

1. Is this a valid use of "myself"?
2. Has anyone else experienced this, or is it a Midwestern regional idiom?

Answer 1

This usage is justified by the usage notes in Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. See my answer to You and Yourself, Me and Myself for a discussion of the grammaticality of myself in non-reflexive constructions.

This usage probably comes from discomfort people have with selecting pronoun case in coordinates. There is a rule in informal English that you always use accusative case in coordinations of pronouns regardless of syntactic position (“My brother and me are hardly on speaking terms these days.”—you can find many examples like this in the Corpus of Contemporary American English), but there is also a rule in standard formal English that those kinds of coordinations are ungrammatical and you must use the nominative case. As a result, people are uncomfortable using either me or I because their intuition leads them to say me but the formal grammar they learned in school draws them towards I, so they “split the difference”, as it were, and use myself.

Edit: Shinto Sherlock correctly points out that the second example usage in the question is in fact a perfectly normal use of reflexive myself. I’m not sure either why it would be a surprising usage.

Answer 2

I have sent the list to Legolas, Glorfindel, Aragorn, and myself.

Hum, that seems like a completely legitimate use of myself to me.

I sent it to myself

rather than

I sent it to me

Answer 3

I agree, it sounds very stuck up. (like what moioci said earlier)

If you have any questions, you can contact Gimli or myself.

This is improper English. (Basically people who want to sound smart but don't know grammar.)

Mind that it has nothing to do with formality, and in proper English, you should never use myself in place of me when it isn't reflexive.

I have sent the list to Legolas, Glorfindel, Aragorn, and myself.

This is correct because it is used as a reflexive.

Answer 4

Far from being appropriate in more formal situations, non-reflexive use of ‘myself’, being ungrammatical, sticks out as ungrammatical and thus, informal.

Anytime I hear a non-reflexive use of ‘myself’,I think the person saying it is using it as a crutch to avoid misusing ‘I’ or ‘me’ because they know they don’t know when to use which.

Maddening to me since the solution is to simplify the sentence, as above, removing other referents such as “He and I’, or ‘He and Jack’ to ‘I’. No one ways ‘Me went to the store.’ Nor do they say ‘They gave it to I…’ But we hear ‘Me and Mary went…’, and ‘She told Mary and I…’

Just take out the other person to determine whether to use Me or I, then add the other back in.

It seems to me that myself has taken root in particular settings. For example, almost any time I read or hear a police report or officer talking, they use Myself instead of Me or I. I sometimes wonder if they are trained to do so, it seems so ubiquitous. I think it is used a lot by some military people as well.

So it seems it is regularly adopted in specific formalized settings, but that does not make it a grammatically correct formal usage.

Now, don’t get me started on ‘There’s guys…’

Answer 5

It's quite commonly used here in the States; "myself" and "yourself" seem to denote only slightly more formal equivalents of "me" and "you", particularly in groups and formal situations. Consider it explication: "and/or myself" is like "and/or even me", both somewhat implying that the listener might not otherwise have expected the inclusion of the speaker in the group.

Nor is "myself" limited to the last element of a list:

You can get in touch with myself or Jimmy when you've completed the work.

Answer 6

Myself is used increasingly in all manners of speech, spoken and written. And it's usually wrong! Steer clear is my advice. If you can reduce a sentence to 'me' or 'I', do so. Get in touch with me. I've sent it to myself. Then add the rest around the sentence... Get in touch with Tom, Dick, Harry, and me. I've sent it to Tom, Dick, Harry, and myself. If 'I' doesn't work in the simple sentence, don't use it in the more complex one. People have a weird antipathy to using 'me', and now even 'I' is being replaced with 'myself', as though 'I' and 'me' sound like boasting or arrogance. Lol I cringe, and despair.