Real life | 27 September 2018

‘I’m just going to pop yourself on hold,’ said the girl from the online shopping firm who was trying to find my amazing disappearing bed.

First a bed I ordered arrived with half of it missing. Then, when I rang to complain, they upgraded me to a better bed by way of apology and when that bed came, it had half missing too. Now I had two halves of two different beds: the headboard half of one, and the frame half of another. But one entire matching bed had I none.

And all that being as it may, the lack of a complete bed was as nothing compared with the irritation of being addressed with a mangled reflexive pronoun.

Why do themselves do it? Do themselves imagine the English language now has a polite pronoun as the French do? So it’s ‘you’ when speaking informally to friends, and ‘yourself’ when addressing strangers, the elderly, and those whose new beds have arrived with half missing twice?

Did themselves decide to start mangling perfectly good pronouns unilaterally or did someoneself higher up the food chain instruct themselves to do it as policy?

‘That’s right, talk posh and the customers will feel overawed and stop arguing.’

This girl had a bad case of it: ‘Yes, and I am trying to sort this out for yourself. If you’ll just let me source another bed for yourself. I’ll have yourself all sorted out with a replacement as soon as possible. Could I just ask yourself to answer a few questions?’

Of all the things I wanted to scream about my lack of complete bed and surfeit of bed halves, the main thing I wanted to scream was: ‘The word is YOU!’ But there was no point.