Educational language: about recursively doing something to oneself
We have a beautiful language from which we can learn. Take the reflexive verb for example. Linguistically, there are two versions (‘mandatory’ and ‘incidental’). The former is the most important, such as ‘I misbehave myself’, where ‘I’ is the subject and ‘myself’ is the reflexive pronoun and can also be viewed as the direct object. This shows that we do this to ourselves. So I do to myself. The word ‘myself’ cannot be replaced by ‘you’ or by ‘him or her’. In the incidental version, this is possible, like in ‘I amuse myself’. You can also amuse someone else.
If we recursively ‘do something to ourselves’, we can also stop doing it. We can learn from this spiritual lesson hidden in our language! We can’t blame this reflexivity on anyone else. Important examples include: hurrying, overacting, feeling ashamed, getting drunk, showing off, and so forth. A very notable one is ‘I annoy myself’. We often tend to blame others for our annoyance. Wrongly so, because we do it to ourselves. If I ‘annoy myself’, I am the cause of my discomfort. No one else is responsible for that. So we can’t pin this unpleasant feeling on someone else: ‘I’ is the subject, ‘myself’ is the direct object, and we must reflexively ask: why am I doing this to myself? And: why don’t I stop?
Fortunately, this verb form also has examples where we ‘do good’ to ourselves, such as ‘I wonder myself’ and ‘I restrain myself. ‘I apologize myself isn’t wrong either, for instance, for your own annoyance. 🙂
When a reflexive verb applies, we should ask ourselves (reflexively again): is this beneficial for me, or am I burdening myself? In the latter case, we can do something about it ourselves and not blame others. This way, we avoid a lot of trouble.
