Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why the mangling of language matters

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I thought that this week I would share with you a bunch of words and phrases which are currently overused and I find thoroughly annoying. The idea came to me after hearing a woman with the IQ of a soap dispenser speaking on Radio 4 about the godawful programme Love Island. During the course of her peroration she continually referred to myself. Not to me, but to herself as ‘myself’. Such as: ‘I would say so far as myself is concerned…’ No, sugartits. The word is ‘I’m’.

She is far from the only culprit: myselfitis is spreading rather more rapidly than the Delta variant. So too is its kind of antithesis. Twice recently I have been asked by phone-callers if ‘yourself’ is happy with the service being provided, etc. Why do they do this? Do they think that addressing me as ‘you’ is too blunt? Or is it an attempt to make their grammar more pretentious so that I might afford them greater respect? I have to say, if this is the case, it doesn’t work. It makes me want to smash their spectacles and spit on their shoes.

One suggestion I’ve heard is that ‘myself’ gets misused (it’s a reflexive pronoun) because the speaker is worried about the egotism inherent in the word ‘me’. So it’s a kind of false modesty, then. Whatever, it gets my goat. So does the wholly unnecessary use of the word ‘today’ — again, usually deployed by people in the service sector. Such as ‘How can I help you today?’ or, upon my entering a restaurant — one that I’ve never been in — ‘And where would you like to sit today?’

‘They’ll never knowingly be sold.’

I cannot for the life of me work out what ‘today’ in this context signifies.

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