blond(e)

[Hex]

This is driving me nuts.

So, I know that if you're talking about a-woman-who-has-fair-hair she is 'a blonde', whereas the male equivalent is 'a blond', since we stole the word from French.

But 'blond' as an adjective...? Is it always the masculine form? so: 'She had blond hair'? or 'The blond woman'??

I looked it up in the (compact) OED but that doesn't completely help, it says:

".... to be usually written with a final e when applied to a woman, especially substantively, a blonde; otherwise commonly written blond like the french masculine."

which implies (I think) that when it's applied to a woman, in general, you use the e (but what does it mean 'especially', then?)

Grammar girl says you don't add the e when it's an adjective. And wikipedia is just confusing.

 

[Ursa major]

I was going to bottle this, but....

I wouldn't add the e to the adjective: objects in English don't** have a gender and so their adjectives would take the basic form, blond.


(I think the OED is saying that the use of the word as a noun to describe a woman with blond hair is an exception, a special case; the special case, in fact).



** - Apart from ships, etc, but I don't think a ship would often be described as being blond or blonde. (And it would, of course, be a blond ship.)

 

[Hex]

Okay, thank you. That makes sense.

So it's 'She had blond hair' since hair is not feminine.

Edit: the ship is just confusing

And: that's a subtly different meaning of 'especially'. Perhaps I should have looked that up too.

 

[Abernovo]

If you're talking about a woman's hair, I think it's always blonde - she has blonde hair, she is a blonde, the blonde woman, etc

Blond for men

However, there is also Blonde Beer/Ale and Blonde wood

Just looked in the Concise OED (11th edtn) that I've got on my laptop. Not sure if this is much more help but :

1. a woman with blonde hair
2. the colour of blonde hair

The alternative spellings blonde and blond correspond to the feminine and masculine forms in French, but in English the distinction is not always made, as English does not have such distinctions of grammatical gender. In the noun the spelling is typically blonde, however.

All very confusing. As to the especially, I think the key word is substantively. I think it's trying to say that if referring to a woman who has that colour hair, she is a blonde.

Personally, I go with blond for men and blonde for women and blond for people as a group.

 

[HareBrain]

This question came up with me too the other day -- I was wondering which to use when the gender of the fair-haired individual couldn't be told.

Answer that, word-slaves!

 

[Ursa major]

My concise OED (sixth edition, but on paper), says of blonde:

a. & n. (Of woman or woman's hair) blond.

Can one refer to a woman's hair (as opposed to the woman herself) as being brunette? If so, the use of the adjective, blonde, for a woman's hair would match this.

I'm still not keen on this, though. At least the noun, blonde, supplies extra information about a person: their gender. You'd probably need to contort a sentence to get the same information solely from the adjective, blonde.

What this really is is the importation of another language's grammar, the kind of thing that leads us to that sad and unfortunate plural, octopi.... (But at least we have examples where more than one octopus needs to be described; English does not have the arbitrary allocation of gender to objects as part of its structure.)

 

[chrispenycate]

As essentially immersed in francophony, I'd probably get this wrong, but I think that in English it should be that a blond woman, she who has blond hair, is referred to as a "blonde" (or, in certain cases, a 'faux blonde', just to really mix things up: why not a 'fausse blonde' as her gender might indicate?) while a beer? I'd never refer to a pale British beer as "une blonde". It must be imported, in which case I'd go by the usage of the country from which it hails.

Besides, the barmaid (probably a faux blonde,) unless she had les cheveux blonds hair being plural) wouldn't understand me if I asked for something in foreign.

 

[The Judge]

The usage note in my ODE is the same as Abernovo's save for this pertinent sentence in the middle:

Thus, blond woman or blonde woman, blond man or blonde man are all used.

It gives blonde as the main adjective (ie look up blond itself and it is there only under blonde as "(also blond)") and the examples it gives include her long blonde hair and I had my hair dyed blonde.

In other words, stop fretting Hex -- use whichever you want. Personally, I'd keep blonde for women and their hair; blond for men, their hair, plurals, inanimate objects and unknowable sexes.


And yes, Ursa, I'd say a woman's hair was brunette (actually, I'd probably say brown, but you know what I mean). I don't think I've ever seen brunet except in the dictionary/thesaurus.

 

[Erin99]

"Blond" and "blonde", with its continued gender-varied usage, is one of few adjectives in written English to retain separate masculine and feminine grammatical genders.

This follows my view, and this subject is very important in my novels. Thus, I always write "Blonde-haired woman" and "blond-haired man", or "a blonde" and "a blond". I DO have a separate gender - for nouns and adjectives. Seph's full-version latest PC OED says the same, that it's one of the few words we've kept from French. It also states, however, that in Britain nowadays people prefer using "blonde" in all cases, all the time.

Really, though, it's up to the author. No one's going to pull you up on it or refuse to take your work on because you've picked whichever version you prefer.

And blah. I should have reloaded the page ages ago before typing my reply - loads have replied!

 

[Parson]

I also suspect that this is a "British" English thing. I can not recall ever having seen blonde in print where there wasn't an UK author.

Here in the States I believe it is always blond.

 

[Ursa major]

It also states, however, that in Britain nowadays people prefer using "blonde" in all cases, all the time.

Well, if someone calls me a blonde, they should take on board one or more extra adjectives to describe a face: black for an eye; red for a nose. (These changes are almost certain to be gender specific.)


Just sayin'. ...

 

[HareBrain]

Not so, Parson. There's the film Legally Blonde, and the Bob Dylan album Blonde on Blonde, for starters.

 

[Hex]

I'm so sorry to go uber-geek here, but I'm inescapably reminded of a quotation about elves and counsel...

Not that I won't be coming back for more, of course.

Thank you all again