English speakers, being unused to the concept of grammatical case, often struggle with it when it comes to relative and personal pronouns which (at least in the first and third person) still exhibit it. This occurs particularly when there is more than one subject or object where often, for fear of making a blunder having been taught that it is polite to say ‘my friend and I’, speakers replace ‘I’ or ‘me’ with ‘myself’.
Grammatical “rule”
The “rule” here is that ‘I’ is a subject pronoun, ‘me’ is an object pronoun and ‘myself’ is a reflexive pronoun; this means that ‘myself’ should only be used as the object or as a reinforcer of a clause whose subject is ‘I’. As an object, for example, you may say ‘She didn’t like my present so I just gave it to myself‘ (‘myself’ is the indirect object of a clause where ‘I’ is the subject); as a reinforcer, you may say ‘I drove there myself’ or ‘I spoke to him myself’ (so ‘myself’ is used to reinforce the subject ‘I’).
This emphatically does not permit ‘myself’ to be used as a replacement for ‘me’ when used as the direct object of a clause or as the indirect object in a clause whose subject is not already ‘I’; in standard English, at least, we say ‘He will be meeting Olivia and me [not myself]’; ‘My colleague and I [not myself and my colleague] will see you outside the office’ and ‘When you get there, you will be giving the box to me [not myself]’.
Yet this ‘error’ happens a lot…
Hypercorrection
Certainly, an aspect of this is hypercorrection. We think that ‘Olivia and me’ does not sound right (as we were told so forcefully to say ‘Olivia and I’, but this applies only to a subject), so we say ‘He will be meeting Olivia and myself’.
However, it strikes me that this is only part of the story.
Emphatic ‘myself’
Research increasingly demonstrates that some speakers now use ‘myself’ essentially to reinforce their own presence in the clause. For example, they say (or, perhaps likelier, write) ‘Myself and my colleague will meet you outside the office’ as a means of putting themselves, rather than their colleague, first; or they say ‘you will be giving to the box to myself’ to emphasise that it is me who will be receiving the box and no one else.
This sort of thing can become established in a language. For example, in French, to say ‘we French’ you are required (at least idiomatically) to reinforce the ‘we’ by adding the word ‘others’, thus nous autres français. Yet in Spanish and Catalan, this usage has extended to become normal in all contexts: the word for ‘we’ (or ‘us’ after prepositions) in Spanish has shifted from nos to nosotros and in Catalan from nós to nosaltres (likewise, in Europe at least, in the second person plural vosotros/vosaltres).
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, therefore, that ‘myself’ will come to be used as an emphatic form in English, and that this use will begin to be regarded as standard; this may expand to other reflexive pronouns (not dissimilarly to the way ‘himself’ or ‘herself’ may be used as a subject in some Irish dialects).
Egotistical ‘myself’
However, it is worth noting that what I have politely called an “emphatic” use of ‘myself’ may in fact be regarded as more “egotistical”. For this reason, I would recommend against using it myself [see what I did there…?]
Ian James Parsley 