Now You’ve Done It

The Colbert Report has taken a strange turn since Stephen’s entry into the already hilarious presidential race: formerly unencumbered satire gives way to awkward meta-commentary. Will Stephen be able to successfully lampoon the process he’s finally joined, or will his ironic credibility suffer as he attempts to emulate the candidates as well as the pundits who endlessly analyze them?

Non sequitur: over the last year or more I’ve been bothered more and more by the improper use of the reflexive pronoun myself. For example: “Please direct any questions to John or myself.”

Myself fits a sentence only when the subject is I (”I hate myself”). In the offensive quote, the implied subject is you, not I. And per the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, you oughtn’t use myself “as a part of a compound direct object when the subject of the sentence has a different referent; instead of They gave a party for my wife and myself, use the standard They gave a party for my wife and me.” QED, bitches.