2021-06-02
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด – B – blond & blonde
แนะนำการใช้ ตามที่ส่วนใหญ่ใช้ แต่ละท้องถิ่น
ความหมาย อาจผันแปร ตาม ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค
Dictionary.com
ออกเสียง blond & blonde= ‘BLOND’
Abused, Confused, & Misused Words by Mary Embree
Blonde = a blond-haired female:
A beautiful blonde stepped onto the stage.
Not to be confused with:
blond = light-colored hair or complexion:
He has blond hair and blue eyes.
Dictionary.com
USAGE NOTE FOR BLONDE
The spelling blonde is still widely used for the noun
that specifies a woman or girl with fair hair:
The blonde with the baby in her arms is my anthropology professor.
Some people object to this as an unnecessary distinction, preferring blond for all people:
My sister is thinking of becoming a blond for a while.
As an adjective,
the word is moreusually spelled blond in reference to all people
(an energetic blond girl; two blond sons),
although the form blonde is occasionallystill used of a female:
the blonde model and her escort.
The spelling blond is almost always used for the adjective
describing hair, complexion, etc.:
His daughter has blond hair and hazel eyes.
Dictionary.com
BLOND VS. BLONDE
What’s the difference between blond and blonde?
Blond and blonde are both adjectives most commonly
used to describethe color of light or yellowish hair
or someone who hassuch hair.
They can alsoboth be used as nouns
referring to a person with such hair,
as in: Should I make this character a blond or a redhead?
They are pronounced exactly the same.
But there is a difference:
the spelling blonde istypically used in a gender-specific way
to refer to ordescribe women and girls with this hair color.
In contrast, the use of blond in a gender-neutral wayis very common.
And when the word is used as an adjective,
this spelling is much more commonly used,
regardlessof the gender of the person whose hair color is being described.
Blond and blonde derive from French,
which has grammatical gender,
meaning that some words end differently
depending on whether they are appliedto men or women
(with e being the feminine ending).
This happensin a few other pairs of words in English, like confidant and confidante,
though in many cases the term without the e
has become largely gender-neutral.
This is the case with blond,
which is the more commonly used of the two.
When describing the colorsof things other than hair,
such as wood or coffee, only the spelling blond isused.
When in doubt,
remember that the spelling blond is appropriate in all cases.
Dictionary.com
Blond vs. Blonde: What’s The Difference?
Grammatical gender is an unfamiliar concept
to some native English speakers.
If you’re learning a language like Spanish, for instance,
one of the earliest lessons is that
some nounsare feminine (la mesa for “the table”)
and othersmasculine (el café for “coffee”).
Gendered words arepart of
many other languages around the world, too,
but not so much in English—or are they?
Believe it or not,
English shared the practice of gendering nouns until around the 1200s.
And, around this time,
it also began borrowingvast amounts of words from French,
which, like Spanish, has grammaticalgender.
This is how we get the whole blond vs. blonde bombshell.
So, what’s the difference?
What does blond mean?
You probably know blond as a hair color.
It literally means“light-colored,”
and was first recordedin English in the mid-1400s.
It derives from the French blond, which refers to “light brown” and similar hues.
But wait, haven’t you seen the word blond spelled with an E too: blonde? Well, those French originswe were just talking about are
why the word has twodifferent spellings in English.
How is blonde differentfrom blond?
Blonde and blond essentially mean the same thing.
It’s justthat in French, blond is the masculine form,
both as a nounand adjective;
adding the E makes it feminine.
So, a woman with blond hair is une blonde, a man, un blond.
In English
—if we are being technical about the word’s French origins
—blonde asa noun or adjective
should be applied to women or girls
“having light hair and usually fair skin and light eyes.”
That means a man or boy is a blond, or has blond hair
—not blonde hair with an E.
The Associated Press (AP) Style Book upholdsthis rule.
Garner’s Modern American Usage, on the other hand,
cautions againstusing blonde due to risks of sexism.
Having a blonde moment or being a dumb blonde
isn’t really about hair color, is it?
Further complicatingmatters
is the factthat blond, in American English,
is often the preferreddefault adjective
while British English tends toward blonde.
Can you say “confusing”?
Is there still a standardized distinctionbetween blonde and blond?
Style guides aside,
the blond and blonde distinctionmay be breaking down in popular writing.
A March 2019 PopSugar article celebrated female country singer Maren Morris’s new “blond” hair.
Meanwhile, in January 2019, a Time headline noted
male actor Chris Messina’s “blonde” hair on the red carpet.
And, it’s not just hair.
Starbuckssells blonde, not blond, espresso,
and some brewers serve up blonde ales.
Do they meanto feminize their coffee or beer,
or is it justthat we are using blond and blonde more interchangeably these days?
As Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer
observes in his 2019 style guide Dreyer’s English:
“‘Blonde’ carries some heavy cultural baggage
by way ofthe moldy pejorative ‘dumb blonde,’
so use itthoughtfully and carefully, if at all.”
What other words follow this pattern?
Interestingly, blond is notthe only gendered hair color.
The word brunette is actually the feminine form of the word brunet.
Like blond(e), these words are French in origin.
Technically, a brunette is a“brown-haired female”
while a brunet is a maleone.
But, this distinction has largely fallen out of fashion,
unlike blond and blonde—and unlike fiancé and fiancée.
A fiancé means “a man engaged to be married”
while a fiancée is a woman so engaged.
The words, first recorded in English in the 1850s,
come from the French fiancer, “to betroth, promise,”
ultimately form the Latin fides, “faith.”
In English,
such gendered languageis common in relationship terms (e.g., girlfriend and boyfriend, husband and wife),
though a societal push for nonbinary, non-heteronormative ways to speak about relationships may change that in the future.
We can see also how language evolves with societal norms
by looking at words like poetess or prophetess,
female forms of poet or prophet that have largely become archaic
as we’ve realized we don’t need to mark gender in these contexts.
That’s because setting aside a term
like poetess just for female poets can imply that
1) poets being male is a default assumption, and
2) female poets are somehow lesser or inferior.
Flight attendant has overtaken stewardess for the airline employee,
as the latter has been variously seen
to trivialize or sexualize the job as woman’s work.
Actor and waiter are also beginning to
prevail over gendered terms like waitress and actress
—though the Academy Awards still makes
the distinction for the latter when it hands out its trophies.
As societytrends more gender-neutral language,
it will be interesting to see
whether or not these and other words
maintain these extraneous, confusing, and often just conventional distinctions in gender.
Who knows, maybe in the future
having a blonde moment will refer to occasions
when people insist on fussing about the differences between blond vs. blonde.
*It’s important to note
that grammatical gender, outside of references to humans, animals, etc.,
doesn’t correlateto natural sex or gender identity.
In most cases, it’s simply a way of categorizing nouns
based on arbitrary assignments
(i.e., there isn’t anything inherently feminine about la mesa in Spanish).
Dictionary.com
HOMEWORK HELP
What is grammatical gender?
Grammatical gender is a way of classifying nouns
that unpredictably assigns them gender categories
that are often not related to their real-world qualities.
For example,
in French, the grammatical gender of la maison (“the house”)
is classified as feminine,
while le livre (“the book”) is classified as masculine.
Grammatical gender is not used in English.
Grammatical inthis phrase means relating to grammar,
which is basically the rules of how to construct sentences in a language.
The word gender here is not really related
to the way that humans identify themselves in real life.
In many languages,
the grammatical gender of a word
affects how other words can be used with it in a sentence.
The three most commonly used grammatical gender categories are masculine, feminine, and neuter, but each language differs.
Grammatical gender iscontrasted
with natural gender or naturalistic gender,
in which nouns are classified
in ways that align withtheir real-world qualities.
Girl and boy are examples of nouns with naturalistic gender.
(In English, this matters because
those words can be replaced with gendered pronouns like she and he.)
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary
blonde′ness, n.
usage:
blonde is still widely used for the noun specifying a woman or girl
with fair hair.
Some people regard this as sexist, preferring blond for all persons.
blond is the usual spelling for the adjective referring to either sex
(an energetic blond girl; two blond sons)
or describing hair, complexion, etc.
blonde is still occasionally applied to a female
(the blonde model and her escort)
and in British English is the preferred spelling
for all senses of the adjective.
The A-Z of Correct English Common Errors in English Dictionary
blond & blonde
BLOND is used to describe men’s hair.
BLOND is used to describe women’s hair.
A BLONDE is a woman
