Yep, I keep finding this out.
I was helping someone correct something and I changed what they had from 'blond' to 'blonde' and the red line showed up to tell me I spelt it wrong. So I went see if it was me writing British again and I could ignore it.
It was only part right. This is what I found.
In French, blond is masculine and blonde is feminine. This distinction generally extends to the English adjectives, especially in British English, where blonde is more common than blond (mainly because the word is used in reference to females more often than than to males). In American and Canadian English, blond is generally preferred over blonde in all cases—even in reference to female hair color—though a minority of writers continue to observe the gender distinction. In any case, using blonde in reference to male hair is simply a misspelling.
The use of blonde as a noun in reference to a female with blonde hair is best avoided because it can be interpreted as sexist.
What I found also really interesting is one of the comments. You should go read all of them, but this is the first one and it made me think of sharing all this with you guys here on DA.
English is unique among major European languages in that it lacks any grammatical gender distinction. Hungarian, Finnish and Basque do, too, but they’re not indoeuropean to begin with.
With this unique position there’s been an ongoing tendency in English to discard the gender differences in the language. A current example is the phrase “she’s a good actor” which doesn't sound wrong at all to most native speakers.
In the case of blond(e), brunet(te), fiancé(e), etc. the tendency may even be stronger due to the fact that both genders have an identical pronunciation, and it even seems that the use of the ending “-ee” (employee, mentee, etc.) has gained general currency to refer to any gender, even though it originally was a feminine ending.Employee is a new one for me. The conversation then goes on with more examples and explanations from other members. In case you didn't get the actor thing, they are saying that it should be 'She's a good actress'.
That one I still do. I didn't know that in some places it was being dropped. I did find out, and then kinda forgot about, the 'fiancé(e)' one. I was looking up the word to see if there was a name we use to have for a guy, who was engaged, even though I knew we called both the girl and guy the same thing. The words sound just the same, so I can see why the extra 'e' was mostly dropped.
Here is the link.
grammarist.com/usage/blond-blo…
Considering there are so many places and languages represented here on DA, I'm sure this could fill a few holes for a lot of people who may have been wondered a few things.
© pica-ae
