Grammar niggles

[beccaelizabeth]

Compulsive proofreading strikes again, but this time with a niggle -

http://www.tameri.com/edit/usage.html

blond / blonde - Blonde refers to a woman, blond refers to a man. Some object to the gender distinction and use “blond” exclusively.

brunet / brunette - Similar to blond, brunette refers to a woman, a brunet is a man.

but

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blond

most people do not borrow French's system of grammatical gender along with the word or confuse the two, the tendency being for North Americans to use the masculine in either case, and other English-speakers to use the feminine in either case.


- so, is using blonde for a guy an error or not? To me it looks like changing their gender with a typo, but if nobody else knows the rule, it isn't a rule. Yesno?

Comments

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

Drives me right round the bend, but I'm probably pickier than you are, even.

I see the feminine used in preference to the masculine in most fic writers; I'll hazard a guess that it is because really, most of us have not seen men described in terms of their hair color in other writing.

Julia, getting set up to do final revisions on 41 and not awake enough yet

[justhuman.livejournal.com]

I dived into my various dictionaries to see how they were written up. The American system of English has a distinct origin. Noah Webster decided that American English should have it's own distinct character from British (this being just post-Revolutionary war). He deliberately adopted spelling based on colonial pronunciation and went out of his way to eliminate French spelling that had been put into British English - thus -iour becomes -ior and -re becomes -er.

Keeping consistent with that, my American dictionary uses Blond as the generic term, but does give a seperate entry for Blonde and indicates that it's feminine only.

I have a Canadian Oxford which says that Blonde is generic and has a foot note in the entry that Blond as being used in America.

Strangely, it doesn't list the British usage, which leads me to believe that it's as muddled in Britan as it is in US.

Wikipedia does say it's a relatively new addition to English. I find that in the US, the trend in the last 20 years or so is to keep foreign language words in their native spelling -- or to return them to their native spelling. Of course, these words tend to be culturally specific words, whereas Blond is just a descriptive term.

In the end, Americans have generally no concept of how to deal with words with gender attached unless it's a job title - steward/stewardess, but even here the trend, due to the women's movement, is to deliberately stop using any gender specific titles

steward/stewardess - flight attendant
waiter/watress - server
butler/maid - domestic staff

This isn't fully caught on in the general public, but in any official human resources paperwork from a company, you'll see the gender neutral terminology because it's taken on legal meaning as far as discrimination.

As a side note to that, the US military (since the inclusion of women into regular service circa-WWII) has always used the male term as a generic. It is perfectly acceptable to address a female officer as "sir". I believe that it's also a practice encouraged by female officers because they feel that it's more important that the rank and file do not see a diffence between a male and female commander.

In the end, I think that using Blond as the generic in America is totally consistent with our other language usage. However, blonde is acceptable in certain style sheets but should only be used for women.