**** Heart Appreciation****

[tblue37]

231. I had already said thanks to the unknown person or person who had given me two unexpected hearts

when some nice person, perhaps the same one or ones, perhaps (probably?) a different one, sneaked up and gave me the third one.

So now I want to say thanks again to whoever** it was who gave me my third heart.

**As a "gift" to my fellow DUers, I am going to slip on my grammar guru hat and answer a question that probably troubles many of you from time to time.

A clause is a "stronger" grammatical structure than a phrase. Therefore, when a clause and a phrase compete to determine the case of a pronoun, the clause wins. That is why "whoever" is in the nominative (subject) case in ". . . to whoever gave me the third one" in my sentence above. The clause wants a subject ("whoever gave&quot , while the prepositional phrase wants an object.

In a wordier and more roundabout version of the sentence, the nominative case would still be called for:

. . . to whoever it was who gave . . .

That is because the "whoever" in that version is acting as the subject complement of the subject ("it was whoever&quot , and subject complement pronouns are also in the nominative case.

Not trying to be a grammar Nazi here, but I know that many people do worry about such things but don't know where to go for quick, easy to understand answers.

People are often insecure about whether their grammar is correct, because there really are a lot of nasty grammar Nazis out there, and they jump at the chance to publicly hector others. If you ever need a grammar or usage question answered, my Grammar and Usage for the Non-Expert site consists of targeted articles. I don't try to cover every aspect of grammar and usage in my articles--just the ones that give a lot of people, including otherwise good writers, trouble:

http://www.grammartips.homestead.com/articleindex.html

[font color = "red"]***BTW, I have ads on my sites, and there's an ad on my pages that registers as "malware" for some protective software programs because apparently it tracks users. (It registers that way on my program, too.) I am going to remove it, but I have many hundreds of pages on my 10 public websites, and I never have much time during the semester, so I can only modify a few pages at each sitting..

The WhiteSmoke ad is the problematic one. Just do not click on it and you will be fine.