Amateur Grammarian I: Confusing Subjects And Objects

I am probably not the only one who learned the hard way that, when you combine yourself and another person in a compound subject or object, you have to list your friend first. It's polite to ask if your friend and you may go to the shore in Mom's car, not the other way around.

I learned this when, in fourth grade, Anthony V____ asked, "May I and Ho Jun go to the library?" of Mrs. Bramer. Nope. Though he got the correct auxilliary verb, he blew the order of the subjects. He had to sit down and write, 100 times, "May Hojun and I go to the library?"

It seems a lot of people learned this order the hard way and then had it beaten into them that not only the order was important, but that any time there was a compound noun you had to use the subjective first person pronoun. So, some people erroneously think that they should ask questions like, "Would you give the pitcher to Chip and I?"

That doesn't work; 'I' is not an object and can't have anything given to it (though Paula Cole took some poetic license with it, once). The correct way to phrase it would be, "Would you give the pitcher to Chip and me." Order is polite, and both atomic components of the compound object are now themselves objects.

Another way to think of it is to break the sentence into two requests:

"Would you give the pitcher to Chip?"
"Would you give the pitcher to I?"

That doesn't sound right, does it? No, it doesn't, because 'I' is not an object.

Another often misused object is 'myself.' I can give myself some things, but you can only give me some things. What's that mean? The word 'myself' is a special object called a reflexive object. It must be preceded by the subject to which it refers.

"I gave myself a shower."

or

"I owe it to myself to stay sober."

But you shouldn't write, "If you have any questions, please contact myself or another member of the team." You must say, "If you have any questions, please contact me or another member of the team."

So I can touch you or myself, and you can touch yourself or me, but I can't touch 'yourself' and you can't touch 'myself'. Now give me a quarter or I'll touch you.

Here is another explanation:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/myself.html.