As any good Office Boy of the age, I get innumerable daily e-mail communications. Being pimped out from one company to another, I have to be inside the e-mail systems of two Fortune 100 corporations on a daily basis, so I get double the amount that most sorry suckers have to contend with. Much like my main man Beerzie, I work for a giant technology corporation and bristle at the blatant abuse the vast majority of our coworkers inflict upon the written English language. Beerzie even has a list of banned words (not limited to written communication), but I’d like to harp on a couple examples here since I have nothing better to do.

Let’s examine one of the numerous baby shower e-mails I received this week. The author—a very nice woman, by the way—has an issue with reflexive pronouns:

...If you are interested in donating a monetary amount for cake, drinks and group present Shelly (11th floor), Debra or myself (14th floor) will be taking money.

Putting aside the fact that the phrasing could certainly be improved, the grammar agent within the reader may note that “myself” cannot take money. Being the indirect object (to whom we give the money), we know that myself is not used correctly here. Even if the person receiving the money was the direct object of a sentence, the correct form of the pronoun would be “me,” because the objective pronoun of I is “me.” But disregard the rules, and lets just let it ring in our ears for a moment. Had one just won a bet with his or her friend, would one say “give myself the money!”? The word the author was looking for is “I.” But the author must have a tin ear for English, because she continues:

...Let Shelly or I know if you have any questions

Most people could solve their grammar issues in written English if they’d just read their messages to themselves before clicking “Send”. Dropping Shelly from the discussion, the author of the above could simply read: “Let I know if you have any questions.” Almost certainly she would hear how ridiculous that sounds, and correct her sentence to read “Let Shelly or me know if you have any questions.”

I think part of the problem with this “fear of ‘me’” is the fact that, as children, we are constantly admonished for the usage of that word when we should, in fact, use “I.” “Garrett and me are going sledding,” a child might say, only to be corrected:

“Garrett and I.”

Eventually, we become gun-shy about the usage of “me.”

Most higher education in this country does not emphasize written communication. I know many people who made it through universities having written a handful of papers, if any at all. The sad fact of the matter is that if you don’t use it, you will lose it (as have I). So even somebody who had excellent composition skills and a great ear for language in high school can morph into a business-speak-using, grammatical ax murderer.

Next up, I’d like to point out that one of the pillars on the IT Community of a Fortune 100 Corporation’s structure is called “Operationalization.”

Let’s look at it again in:

Operationalization.

Anyone who is in technology or reads a little can guess that the IT Community wishes to align individuals and resources with the goal of bringing new technologies into operationally-ready states. In other words, the organization wants to make new stuff work with old stuff. In order to express this, the organization has used a word that is not a word. Go ahead, search on any dictionary site.

The worst part, I am sometimes forced to use this “word”, much like being forced to admit I like Michael Bolten.