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In reply to the discussion: I'm a teacher, and I will be making the following announcement to all my classes tomorrow: [View all]alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)As an emphatic, people say "I myself..."
That has always been a perfectly legitimate construction. The reflexive pronouns are also known as emphatic in certain cases, but no case like the one in the OP, where the pronoun simply substitutes for the proper subject.
Certainly, there is a descriptivist (rather than, ahem, prescriptivist) argument to be made that so many people misunderstand the reflexive pronoun today that it can and does function as a subject. But the notion that its function as an emphatic would allow the substitution in the OP is silly. We've always known that reflexive pronouns can add emphasis, but they do so by being added to the proper subject (and similar scenarios), not by substituting for it: He himself brought the coal to newcastle. Not "Himself brought the coal to Newcastle." That's an emphatic usage in the subject slot. "You yourself said that you don't believe it." Not "Yourself said that you don't believe it."
In this case, an emphatic use of the pronoun myself would be perfectly fine as follows:
"Neither I myself nor any staff at this school.."
That's an emphatic usage. "Neither myself nor any other staff..." is a simple incorrect usage, like "Himself brought the coal to Newcastle," and not in the least bit salvaged by calling it emphatic.
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