I personally myself believe there is a problem with the first person. Just think how much trouble we get into with “me, myself and I.” We never seem to know which pronoun to use, but we surely use them a lot, preoccupied as we are with ourselves.

Columnists particularly like the capital ‘I,’ yet I wouldn’t be caught dead leading off an essay in that manner. Tom Wolfe wasn’t talking about me when he coined the “me decade” to capture the self-centeredness of the 1970s. No way was he referring to myself.

In my own personal opinion, I think there is a problem.

Bryan A. Garner explains it this way in “A Dictionary of Modern American Usage:” “Myself is best used either reflexively [“I have decided to exclude myself from consideration”] or intensively [“I myself have seen instances of that type”]. But ‘myself’ shouldn’t appear as a substitute for I or me. Using it that way is thought somehow to be modest, as if the reference were less direct.” It, in fact, is no less direct.

He offers these examples: “My wife and myself [read I] were in a religious cult for more than 15 years before the leader fell over dead.” “The exclusion of women and women’s concerns is self-defeating. For instance, myself and other women in Hollywood [read many women in Hollywood, including me] would deliver millions of dollars of profit to the film industry if we could make films and television shows about the lives of real women.” And, finally, “Those ins and outs are largely a self-learning process, though knowing the experience of someone like myself [read me] might make the learning shorter, easier and less painful.”

Speaking of the ins and outs of the learning process, maybe we should have focused more on the use of “I” and “me” so that we don’t swap them interchangeably – and incorrectly. Just today, a sad song on the radio (sadder yet because of the grammar gaffe) described the fading pictures on the wall of “you and I.” In the next breath, the radio announcer said: “This station and me want to thank our listeners, each and every one of you.”

A frazzled mother in the grocery store warned her young son to bring the cart back to “Daddy and I this very minute or you can’t keep the gum.”

The preacher told his congregation if they needed counseling to call “the church secretary or myself anytime without hesitation.”

On and on it goes, this confusion over me, myself and I. Apparently, it’s nothing new. Remember the song “Me and My Shadow?” And, then there’s a line in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that goes like this:

“Which way shall I fly infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”