Grammar girl here, Valentine's Day is coming up, so I thought it would be a good time to say

I love you.

Not only because I love you, but also because I love you as a handy little sentence for

remembering the difference between a subject and an object.

The first question you should be asking is why you should care about the difference between

a subject and an object.

This seems like pretty dry boring grammar terms.

Well, the reason they matter is that you often have to know whether you're dealing with

a subject or an object to be able to choose the right word.

The difference between who and whom, lay in lie and sit and set all come down to answering

the question, subject or object.

And all the complaints I get about people using I when they should use me and vice versa,

those also come down to knowing a subject from an object.

Typical English sentence order is subject verb object, whereas the experts like to call

it SVO.

That means you often find the subject at the beginning of a sentence and the object at

the end or at least after the verb.

And this is true of our little sentence I love you.

I love you is a subject verb object sentence.

Subjects do something or are something.

In this case, the subject is I and is doing some loving.

Objects receive the action or have something done to them.

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