A reader has emailed in.

Hi,

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people on Facebook or Myspace will put captions on their photos reading “John, Bill, and I” or “Mark and I at the beach”. Shouldn’t it be “John, Bill, and me”? You wouldn’t show a picture to someone and say “this is I at the beach”. You would say “this is me at the beach” so shouldn’t you use “me” even when you add other people’s names to it?
Just wanted to make sure I was correct before I jumped on my soap box.

Thanks,

Christan

Christan, get out that soap box, chrome-plate it, polish it until it gleams, jump on it, brandish your megaphone with a smug flourish and shout about your peeve to your heart’s content because you are absolutely right.

“I” is the first person singular pronoun when one is the subject of a sentence and “me” is the first person singular pronoun when one is the object. So “Tom, Dan and I made fun of the grammatically inaccurate drunk in the pub” is correct. However “the drunken man and his friends beat the living crap out of Tom, Dan and I” is incorrect.

I find this mistake especially annoying as it tends to be made by people trying too hard to avoid the word ‘me’ because it doesn’t sound formal. In trying to sound clever they are making the same mistake they want to avoid. My advice: don’t be so poncey!

Myself is another form that people wanting to appear grammatical like to overuse. Paul Brains* Brians covers this matter in his book Common Errors in English Usage, which I would suggest you all should buy if it wasn’t freely available online.

‘Myself’ is no better than ‘I’ as an object. ‘Myself’ is not a sort of all-purpose intensive form of ‘me’ or ‘I’. Use ‘myself’ only when you have used ‘I’ earlier in the same sentence: ‘I am not particularly fond of goat cheese myself.’ ‘I kept half the loot for myself.’

Quite right, Paul. He goes on to summarise this topic better than I ever could, so I’ll sneak out for a cup of tea while Paul finishes off for me.

All this confusion can easily be avoided if you just remove the second party from the sentences where you feel tempted to use “myself” as an object or feel nervous about “me.” You wouldn’t say, “The IRS sent the refund check to I,” so you shouldn’t say “The IRS sent the refund check to my wife and I” either. And you shouldn’t say “to my wife and myself.” The only correct way to say this is, “The IRS sent the refund check to my wife and me.” Still sounds too casual? Get over it.

*Well done for spotting my deliberate mistake, MRP. Good to know you are paying attention.