Are you guilty of ‘genteelism’?
‘Everyone’s been very kind to my husband and I,’ said someone behind me in a (spaced) queue. That is the classic genteelism. We are taught when young not to say ‘Me and my friend went swimming’ and end up talking nonsense. We’d never say ‘very kind to I’, but the genteel yoking cannot be shaken off. I’ve been entertained by looking up ‘Genteelism’ in the first edition of Henry Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926). He characterised it as ‘the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the
