When “Me, Me, Me” Means “You, You, You”

Katy Waldman examines one subtle way people inadvertently signal their insecurities:

We know now that the linguistic expression of low confidence plays out in pronouns. Until recently, many experts believed that first-person singular referents were verbal playthings for the powerful and narcissistic, the me-me-me-me-me people who demand attention. But as James Pennebaker, a psychologist from the University of Texas at Austin, has written, the pronoun “I” often signals humility and subservience. A more confident person is more likely to be surveying her domain (and perhaps considering what “you” should be doing), rather than turning inward. …

[Linguist William] Labov’s experiment suggests that punctilious attention to “proper” usage may come from a place of insecurity. The extreme form of this is hypercorrection, in which “a real or imagined grammatical rule is applied in an inappropriate context, so that an attempt to be ‘correct’ leads to an incorrect result.” (Think substituting “you and I” for “you and me” as the object of a sentence, or all the stilted uses of whom.) Labov and his successors found that people hypercorrect most in moments of self-consciousness—when switching into a shaky second language or addressing a crowd. Perhaps their zeal to “get it right” is just another version of the desire for belonging.