The Language Ninja is hoping you are having a splendid middle-of-February, and that your Valentine’s Day was a wonderful celebration of affection between you and the one you love most. For the Ninja, it was a day largely spent weeping. Let’s get started!

Q: When is it appropriate to use “I,” “me,” or “myself” in a sentence?

A: If you are an elected official giving a press conference or a director of marketing giving a presentation, it is mandatory that you use “myself” in any instance you might possibly be tempted to use “me” or “I.” No, it isn’t “correct;” it just makes you sound important.

The willy-nilly use of “myself” isn’t grammatically incorrect in the sense that it typically leaves listeners unsure of the speaker’s meaning. Sometimes, speakers (and writers) use “myself” as a fallback option, because they don’t know if it is correct to use “I” or “me.” In most cases, it is merely an overabundance of letters; “myself” just sounds more firm and official than “I” or “me.” (“Officer Velasquez and myself commandeered the donuts and commenced snacking.”)

Any possessive pronoun followed by the suffix “-self” is what is called a “reflexive” or “intensive” pronoun. Basically, the reflexive refers to the sentence’s subject, indicating that the action affected the same person. (“I spilled homemade Dorito powder on myself!”) Intensive pronouns are used entirely for emphasis, when the sentence is otherwise clear and complete. (“I made those homemade Doritos myself!”)

When it comes to “I” and “me,” quite a few English speakers look upon “me” as being the linguistic back-woods cousin of “I.” In reality, “me” is an object pronoun, and “I” is a subject pronoun. The Ninja suspects this phenomenon was born from being told that the grammatically correct phrase is “My sister and I ate SpaghettiOs,” not “Me and my sister ate SpaghettiOs.” Then there was the whiplash of being told that we were wrong when we said “Mom made SpaghettiOs for my sister and I.” The scars still linger.

In simplest terms, if you are doing something, you use “I.” (“I beat up that guy who used the pronoun ‘me’ improperly.”) If something is being done to you, you use “me.” (“That crazed linguist beat me up!”) If you do something that affects you; if want to indicate that you did it alone; or if you want to emphasize the fact that it particularly affects you, use “myself.” (“I bought myself some drinks. I then attacked a guy by myself. I, myself, am drunk.”)

The fact that scholars will argue over the use of “I” and “me” in certain complex circumstances indicates that there is no real consensus, and no real “right” and “wrong” in many cases. If you can identify the subject and the object in a sentence, then your use of “I,” “me,” and “myself” is probably going to be spot-on. Life is too short to get into a heated comments section tussle over nominative, dative, and accusative cases.

If you are still confused, you can always take a tip from the Ninja’s handbook and refer to yourself exclusively in the third-person. The Ninja herself is out.

Holly Troupe is a professional web content writer and an amateur everything else. She spends her days writing, eating, and looking for ways to incorporate the term “perfidy” into the urban vernacular.