| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
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| yourself, yourselves (prons.) |
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| Yourself is singular, yourselves plural, and the number of each is clear from its form, as is no longer true of the pronoun you, which is now both singular and plural. Although myself in other than use as a reflexive or emphatic pronoun is Substandard, the same strictures are rarely applied to yourself and yourselves, perhaps because we find an extra usefulness in these number-distinctive forms. The reflexive use is Standard, as in You shouldn’t blame yourself [yourselves] for this mistake; so are emphatic uses, as in You yourself [yourselves] are to blame. And at the Conversational levels and in Semiformal and Informal contexts, some nonreflexive uses are appropriate too, as in Let’s keep this a secret between yourself and me and I’d like to recruit some better fielders, like yourselves and Fred. Only in the most conservative Oratorical or Edited English are such uses likely to be deemed inappropriate. | 1 |
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| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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