Reflexive Pronouns

A reflexive pronoun exists to show that the subject of a sentence is doing something to or for itself: she taught herself, they blamed themselves. That's the whole job. The subject and the object have to be the exact same person or people. The moment another name shows up as the object alongside the pronoun, that match breaks, and the reflexive has no work left to do. In 'Please contact Sarah or myself,' the subject is an unnamed 'you,' not the speaker, so myself has nobody to reflect back to. The plain object pronoun me is what belongs there.

People reach for myself when me feels too blunt or too casual for a formal sentence. That instinct is exactly backwards: myself is not a fancier, more polite version of me, it's a different grammatical tool with one narrow use. A quick test exposes the error every time. Strip out the other name in a compound object, like 'the manager trained Luis and myself,' and read what's left: 'the manager trained myself.' Nobody says that, because the manager and the trainee aren't the same person. That broken sentence proves myself was never the right choice.

This topic sits next to pronoun case because the fix is the same object pronoun you'd use anywhere else: me, him, her, them. The only twist reflexives add is the identity rule, and that rule also explains the spelling. Himself and herself are built on possessive forms (his, her), but the standard plural is themselves, built on the object form them, not the nonstandard theirselves.