The most damaging linguistic errors are those which leave you seeming socially pretentious.

I would like to point out two of these:

1. Fred and I / Fred and Me.

The confusion over this issue normally starts in the first year of Infants School (for non UK readers, the earliest stage of schooling, except for nursery).Typically, a child will say ‘Me and Fred are going to play football’. The teacher will make a double correction:

a) The teacher will point out that the child should put himself or herself second in the construction. Actually this is a rule of etiquette, not of language.

b) The teacher will point out that the child should have said ‘I’, not ‘me’. In the above example this is correct, since I/Me is the subject of the sentence, but this is where the error takes hold; the child associates having to say ‘I’ instead of ‘me’ with the fact that he was linked to another person by the conjunction ‘and’. Thus in correcting one error, the teacher lays the foundations of another one, and we begin to hear e.g. ‘Jim is going to play with Fred and I.’, or ‘A large dog has just been chasing Fred and I.’. These are both wrong.

In the first example, ‘Fred and I’ are governed by the preposition ‘with’. You would not say ‘Jim is going to play with I’, and it is equally wrong to say ‘Jim is going to play with Fred and I’. Similarly, you would not say ‘A large dog has just been chasing I’, and, for the same reason should not say ‘A large dog has just been chasing Fred and I.’

It is not necessary to have a complex understanding of formal grammar to get this right; there is a simple method of getting it.

In your head, you simply have to remove ‘Fred and’ from the sentence, work out whether you would say ‘me’ or ‘I’, and then reinsert ‘Fred and’. You will then have a correct sentence, at least from this point of view.

One warning should be given, i.e. the mistake is now so common that, although you have it right, you may be considered wrong by some or all of your listeners.

2. The incorrect use of myself and yourself.

There are two correct uses of myself / yourself:

a) ‘I have hurt myself.’ or ‘You have hurt yourself.’ This is known as the reflexive; the subject and object are the same person.

b) ‘I should have done it myself.’ or ‘You should have done it yourself’. I do not know a term for this, but it implies either that ‘it’ has been done less well than ‘I’ or ‘you’ could have done it, or that it was ‘my’ or ‘your’ responsibility to do ‘it’.

However, the terms are often used incorrectly, e.g. ‘I will get the delivery to your wife and yourself as quickly as possible.’ This should be ‘I will get the delivery to your wife and you as quickly as possible.’

One more word of advice: unless you have actually been asked to point out errors, or know the person extremely well, don’t point it out when other people make these mistakes, especially as they are usually made during a special effort to speak correctly