Myself and I

Because I love true crime shows, it should come as no surprise that I love the Oxygen True Crime channel. My favorite show on the channel is New York Homicide. I love New York cops just because I love the way New York cops talk. And even if the show were a waste of 59 minutes and 59 seconds (it isn’t), it would be worth it for the one second in which some detective pronounces the word, apartment, as apawtment. It’s the one thing you can only hear on New York Homicide.

There are other words you can hear in every true crime show, regardless of where the story takes place or what department the police are in. Observe is one such word. Cops don’t see anything. They observe. Another word you can hear on every true-crime show is myself. It typically plays out something like this: “Myself and another detective went to observe what happened in the apawtment.”

Observe I can live with. It’s what makes cops cops. Myself? Not so much. I don’t know if they teach that idiomatic pronoun usage in police academies or what. But every time I hear it, the exact same internal dialogue plays in my head between me and myself. It goes like this:

The Chicken or the Egg?

Maybe, as we remain committed to knowing less, we want to create the impression we know more. Maybe, because we know how unimportant we are, we want to create the impression we’re more important (than we know we are) by using words like, myself. And maybe, because we know we’re becoming increasingly less important because we’re determined to know less, we don’t want to subordinate ourselves by saying things like, “Another detective and I went to observe stuff in the apawtment.” We’re not playing second fiddle to anybody, damn it.

Which came first, the loss of humility or the loss of willingness to learn grammar? I don’t know.

All I know is myself and another detective were observing stuff in the apawtment.