Me, Myself, and I

Oh me oh my, do I ever flinch when I see these words get mixed up!

Do you find yourself looking up to professional athletes as the avatars of grammatical wisdom? If so, you're gonna love this sentence:

Harvey and myself just want to win and collect gazillions of dollars playing a game, but we don't like to talk about that part.

Take a look at those words in bold at the top of this blog entry. Do you know what you see? You see pronouns (well, not "and," but you knew that...didn't you?). Pronouns are words used in place of nouns, although some of our avatarish athletes don't even know that much ("Harvey and Tony just want to win," said Tony. Gee, Tony, what's next--the regal "we"?).

If you use a pronoun, you also have to know how it's functioning--is it the subject of the sentence? The direct object? The indirect object? The semi-demidirect object? Okay, I made that last one up.

"I" is used as the subject of a sentence. I just want to win. So is "we": We just want to win. So when we split "we" up into its individual components (Harvey and Tony), and Tony is the guy doing the talking, why does "I" become "myself"? Hint: it doesn't!

Myself is called a "reflexive" pronoun. That's because it reflects back on an earlier pronoun that refers to the same person, i.e., Tony. So:

I gave myself a pat on the back for not misusing the word "myself" for all of two minutes," crowed Tony proudly.

"I" is the subject of Tony's sentence. Tony has identified himself, right? Okay, the next time Tony refers to himself (hint, hint--who does "himself" refer to in that sentence?), he uses a pronoun that reflects back on the original pronoun he used. He uses "myself."

If you have trouble with this, remember the basic rule that you've apparently forgotten: If you have a compound subject (or object) in a sentence, and one of the subjects (or etc.) is a pronoun, use the pronoun by itself in the sentence to see if it makes sense.

I just want to win. Correct.
Myself just want[s] to win. <----HAHAHAHA!

So, Harvey and I just want to win. Ahhh, thanks Tony. I'll be rooting for you myself.

I don't want to forget about our little friend, "me". Me, like myself, is used as a direct or indirect object. But me is a non-reflexive pronoun, because it has nothing in a sentence to reflect back upon: He beat me, not He beat I, or He beat myself. You can use the same rule as for "I" to figure out when to use "me": He beat us becomes He beat her and me, not He beat her and I, because you wouldn't say, He beat I (nor would you say, He beat she, for the same reason).

Does myself make me clear?

Affect v. Effect

Do these two lovelies confuse you sometimes? If you speak Latin, probably not. But who needs four semesters of Latin when there's a dictionary handy? (Yes, that's a subtle hint to all dictionaryphobes).

Let's talk verbs: Effect means "bring about", or "produce". Affect means "alter", or "influence". Now, two sentences:

A war in Iraq will effect changes in governments in the Middle East. Similarly, but not identically, A war in Iraq will affect the forms of governments in the Middle East.

The first sentence tells us (don't worry about whether it's true) that a war in Iraq will bring about changes in Middle East governments. If we said, A war in Iraq will affect changes in governments, we'd be saying that war would change the changes occurring in governments--which might be true, but it's not what we mean to say, is it?

Okay, let's screw with the second sentence: A war in Iraq will effect the forms of governments in the Middle East. What that means is, a war will produce forms of government in the Middle East, with the implication that there are no forms of government in the Middle East before war comes along to create them! Hey, even the guys in D.C. know better than that...don't they?